


Tread Softly

by Sapphy, SapphyWatchesYouSleep (Sapphy)



Series: The Eternal Batman Universe [3]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Secret Six
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Future, Arkham Asylum, Artificial Intelligence, Barbara Gordon is Oracle, Bruce Wayne Sex Tapes, Cock Tease, Costume Kink, Denial of Feelings, Escape, Future Fic, Light BDSM, M/M, Mad Science, Mutilation, Mutually Unrequited, Plot, Prison, Science Experiments, Torture, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-25
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-01-20 19:06:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 31,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1522211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphy/pseuds/Sapphy, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphy/pseuds/SapphyWatchesYouSleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce needs to break into Arkham. Some things are important enough to be worth making a deal with the devil for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In which Scandal has a terrible idea...

**Author's Note:**

> Things you need to know about this fic:
> 
> 1\. Scandal Savage (beloved daughter of Vandal Savage) has become a superhero, in memory of her wife Liana. She is called Vengeance.
> 
> 2\. The Oracle network is basically facebook for superheroes. Babs set it up before she died and ensured that new superheroes would be able to join it without compromising security. For the most part, that's how Supers contact one another these days.
> 
> 3\. Following the dismissal of the final Arkham, the Assylum is now run by a pharmaceuticals giant called IGA. They are not nice people. The new director is Jonas Walsh, a man so megalomaniacal even Lex Luthor would think he needed to tone it down a bit.
> 
> I think that's everything. Feel free to drop me a line to ask about anything I forgot to explain.
> 
> Oh, and if you want to know what Joker climbing looks like, I imagine it like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPN3gLVDsOY

Vengeance finds him on top of the ACE chemicals building, a stark silhouette against the night sky, gazing down impassively at the knife fight taking place between rival drug pushers on the street below.

“I need to get into Arkham,” she says, without preamble.

“Can’t help you,” he tells her. “I don’t deal with them anymore.” He’s considering whether to intervene in the fight. He’d hoped Simmons might lead him to his supplier, but there’s no chance of that if Bruce reveals himself, and even less chance if Han kills him.

“I know,” she says, crouching on the edge of the building beside him. He glances over at her. She looks, if anything, younger than when he’d first met her, nearly a hundred years ago. Her skin gleams gold in the light pollution, and darkness turns her brown hair raven black. She looks, he thinks, like a piece of sculpture, too beautiful to be really real. “This is a courtesy. Didn’t want to make a move on your territory without warning you.”

“Appreciate it,” he tells her. She could have just sent him a message via the Oracle Network, but she has better manners than that. Understands that some things should be done face to face. They’re not friends, but he respects Vengeance, and finds her old fashioned formality of manner easy to deal with. “You've got a way in? Their security’s tight. Fake IDs won’t work, they have biometric scanners at every entrance, and they’ve closed off all the sewers.”

“I know,” she says. “I was thinking of getting myself a bullet-proof vest and going in through the front door. I’m pretty hard to stop.”

“Lot of guards will be hurt,” he comments.

“I hear IGA offer good medical,” she responds. "I'm not intending to kill any of them. Beyond that, I don’t care about their welfare." She sighs. “If only some of the old guard were still around. Penguin and Joker used to break out on a weekly basis. I could have made a deal.”

Batman doesn’t shuffle his feet like a scolded child, but only because he’s Batman and much too old and dignified for that. “Joker was never confirmed dead,” he says.

“He hasn’t blown up a building in a decade,” she replies absently, her eyes on the fight below. “He’s dead.”

There’s a long moment of silence while he debates with himself. In the street below, the arrival of a group in Low Boyz colors breaks up the fight.

He’d sworn never to tell anyone Joker’s location, not even Clark (should he ever return). But Vengeance isn’t Clark. She doesn’t care about Bruce’s mental health, or his morality. She’ll see, he thinks, that the Batcave is the safest place for Joker. If there’s one thing he’s learnt about Scandal Savage in the years since she became a superhero, it’s that she can be trusted to do what’s best for the many. She’s refreshingly pragmatic, with her father’s unemotional way of looking at things tempered by a decency he thinks she must have inherited from her mother.

“Need you to keep this quiet,” he says, eventually. “Can’t risk Aces Wilde and his cult hearing this. Or Red and the Wolf.”

“You know where Joker is.”

“I do. I can ask him if he’ll help you. It’s likely he’ll agree. He’s not trustworthy, but he would be less dangerous than facing Arkham’s security head on.”

“Is he ill?” she asks, then smiles at his blank face. “Tell him I need to get someone out. She’ll be in one of the high security anti-meta cells. I can check the records once we’re in.”

"Who're you breaking out?" Normally he wouldn't ask, it's Scandal's business, but he feels he has a right to know what kind of a monster she's intending to unleash in his city.

"Sopporo," she says. "I promised someone I'd keep an eye on her. Can't do that while she's in there. She's no danger to your city."

Bruce has never met Sopporo, but he knows about her, thanks to messages on the Oracle Network. A psychic, of sorts. People call her the dream eater. He wonders who had meant enough to Scandal that she'd risk breaking into Arkham to rescue the girl.

“How many in and out?” he asks.

“Ideally, me in, me and Sopporo out. I want to keep things as small as possible.”

Bruce nods. “I’ll see what I can do. Watch the network.”

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

“Do you know how to get into Arkham?” Bruce asks when he gets back.

Joker is sitting in front of the central bank of screens, feet propped up on the desk, eating candy corn and watching a telenovella. Bruce isn’t sure he actually speaks Spanish, but he seems to be enjoying it.

“I know how to get out,” Joker says. “I’ve never needed to break in.”

“One of your escape routes must work in reverse, surely,” Bruce says.

“Theoretically, yes,” Joker says. “Why?”

He turns to peer curiously at Bruce, red eyes gleaming with interest.

“There’s someone inside who Vengeance wants to rescue,” Bruce says. “They don’t let Superheroes in anymore, and it’s been years since anyone actually got released from there.”

“They can be a little possessive about their guests,” Joker agrees. “Don’t like anyone else getting to see them. It won’t be easy. Sopporo is powerful. She’ll be in high security.”

Bruce doesn’t bother asking how Joker knows who their target is. It’s unlikely he’ll get a straight answer. “You hold the world record for the most prison breaks of anyone in history,” he points out. Appealing to Joker’s vanity is always a good way of getting him to play along.

Joker smiles at him, that warm genuine smile that makes the small scar on Bruce’s side ache with the memory of what will happen if he lets himself give in to his prisoner’s charm.

Suddenly the Joker’s smile fades. “You’re not going to leave me there, are you?” he asks urgently. “It’s not nearly as cozy as it was in the old days. No visitors, and they’re really much too fond of electricity.”

Bruce’s heart aches in sympathy with his side. He will never fully forgive himself for continuing to return Joker to Arkham even after it was obvious something was deeply wrong there. He will never free himself of the image of Joker after his last escape, so broken and hurt that Bruce had allowed himself to be shot rather than take Joker back there.

“You’re never going back there,” he swears. “Not while I’m alive.”

Joker nods, real relief in his eyes, and Bruce hates himself just a little bit more. 

“You don’t even have to come with us,” Bruce adds, voice soft. “You can teach me the route.”

Joker ducks his head to hide his expression, but says, “Don’t be ridiculous, Batsy-baby! As if I’d turn down a chance to visit the old homestead again!” in such an obnoxiously cheerful voice that Bruce just knows he’s trying to hide real fear.

“Any ideas for entry routes?” he asks, trying desperately not to draw attention to Joker’s moment of weakness.

“Walsh has some pretty nifty gadgets,” Joker says thoughtfully, “but he doesn’t know the land and the buildings like the Arkhams did. There’s bound to be an entrance or two he hasn’t found yet. And the historical society wouldn’t let him touch a lot of the older areas. I heard one of the nurses saying last time I was there that he’s just boarded them all off. If we can get into Amadeus’ office, we should be able to go almost anywhere in the main building undetected.”

“Metas will be in one of the newer buildings,” Bruce points out. “The manor isn’t secure enough.”

Joker nods enthusiastically. He seems to be enjoying himself, his fear of a moment ago apparently completely forgotten. “D block, probably. It had the strongest walls to begin with, and three back-up generators. But that’s okay. The kept me in D block for a while. I used to stroll out all the time, just to get some air.”

“No bombs, mind,” Bruce says, remembering some of Joker’s more dramatic escapes. “And no killing anyone.”

Joker grins. “I already dealt with all my doctors, that first time I ran away from you. There’s no one left I particularly want to kill.”

“That’s hardly reassuring Joker. You profess to like having me around, and you’ve nearly killed me four times now.”

Joker waves a long fingered hand dismissively. “Love taps,” he says. “And I promise to be on my best behavior.”

Bruce is not reassured. He has too many scars from Joker on his best behavior.


	2. In which Oracle isn't as gone as we thought

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Quick note: Joker knows Batman's identity, but since Bruce Wayne is officially dead, he doesn't think it matters. Batsy is the one he cares about, not his mask.

System online.

Print: Welcome to the Bat Computer. Please state your user name.

Vocal input: “Batman”

Run voice print recognition

Voice print not recognized

Additional data - User Batman left the building 4 hours, 17 minutes and 64 seconds ago.

Print: Access denied. Please state your username.

Vocal input: “Joker”

Run voice print recognition.

Voice print identified as Joker, the.

Print: Access denied. Please state your username.

Vocal input: “Listen you worthless hunk of junk, I'm just trying to get details on Scandal Savage, okay? I don't want to change anything or access anything super secret. I just want to know what her skills are.”

Processing input: Joker requests read-only access to file 1067 'Vengeance'. File is low security.

Joker does not have user access. Joker has complete Batcave access. Conflicting data. Error. Additional data required.

Query.

Print: why?

Vocal input: “Batsy asked me to plan a break in. I need to know Scandal's skills so I can factor them in.”

Processing input. Analysis complete. Joker is acting on instruction from user: Batman. Joker is not truthful. Additional data required. Scanning archives for collaborating evidence. Evidence found. Conversation between user: Batman and Joker on April 27th at 3:39 am. Oracle network message from user: Batman to Network user Vengeance. Text: ‘Am able to report good news on the Arkham plan.’ Conclusion: user Batman wishes Joker to have read only access to file 1067.

Opening file 1067.

Vocal input: “See, was that so hard?”

Processing input. Dismissing input.

Vocal input: “well fine then, be like that! Don’t think I don’t know how chatty you are with Bruce. Is this because of the whole shooting you thing? Or that time I killed your step-mom? Because you really shouldn’t blame me. I wouldn’t have had to do it if Batsy had just paid me some attention you know. It’s really his fault.”

Processing input. Analyzing input. Joker refers to the paralyzing of Barbara Gordon, and death of Sarah Essen-Gordon. He considers Batman the prime cause of those events.

Print: This unit’s logic circuits are based on Barbara Gordon. This unit is not Barbara Gordon. This unit bears no resentment against you for your actions. This unit does not feel resentment. And it was your fault.

Vocal input: Laughter. “Can’t fool me, circuit-breaker. You might not be Babs, but you’re not just ‘a unit’. There’s a brain in there somewhere kiddo.”

Processing input. Analyzing input. Joker considered this unit to be a person.

Print: Section 9 has details of her technical proficiencies. In addition…

Opening file 992: Vandal Savage.

Print: You might find this of interest.

Vocal input: “You know, I like you a whole lot better than the human you. Can we be friends?”

Analyzing input. Dismissing… Action cancelled. Storing input.

 

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Bruce lays the plans on the table. It had taken him three days of undercover work to get them, three days of scrubbing floors and wearing a fake beard that itched and wondering whether Joker was actually eating the vivid green apples Bruce had bought in the hope of persuading him to eat something other than candy. Three days of keeping his head down and not talking back and feeling just a little bit smug that he’d never treated his employees like this, even the menial workers.

In the time he was gone, all Joker seems to have done is charmed the computer into talking to him despite his lack of access privileges for anything other than TV and Movies, and built a small replica of the Batmobile out of marshmallows. Bruce can’t help feeling a little bit smug.

"These architects," Joker says, leaning over Bruce’s shoulder to peer at the plans, "are bigger crooks than the whole Falcone family put together. There's whole wings missing from those plans."

Bruce doesn't understand why Joker always insists on standing so close behind him. It's not like there's no room, the cave is huge, and the plans are big enough to cover the entire table. Joker smells of coffee.

"Do you remember the layout?" Bruce asks. “Could you draw the missing wings?” He knows he’ll be able to. Joker's memory for people is sketchy at best, but when it comes to things that interest him, like escape plans and bomb recipes, it's photographic.

"Of course," Joker says, sounding offended.

Bruce smiles, pleased with his own foresight, and produces a photocopy of the plans he was able to take when the guy he was working with was on a cigarette break. "Add on everything you know of that's missing," he says. "That should give us an idea of how the old and new sections relate to one another."

“I don’t know why Babs doesn’t already have all this on record,” Joker grumbles, snatching the pen from Bruce’s hands and covering the table with his own copy of the plan.

Bruce’s heart clenches at the name, the way it always does, maybe always will, when he remembers that she’s gone. It takes him a minute of stunned silence to realize Joker must mean the Bat Computer.

“She’s, it’s, not Babs,” he chokes out. “It’s just a computer.”

“Just a computer wouldn’t sass me,” Joker says, adding walls to the plan with quick meticulous strokes of his pen. “Or show me porn every time I tried to access a file it didn’t want to give me.”

Bruce can’t repress a snort of laughter. He laughs more now, he realizes. More than he ever did before Clark left. He’s not sure that’s a good thing.

“You know some of it was of you,” Joker adds, poking his tongue out the side of his mouth in concentration. “I’d seen the Bruce Wayne sex tapes before of course, but they’re a whole lot more stimulating now I know it’s really you behind the skin-mask. Really it’s a wonder I got anything done at all while you were gone. We’re out of tissues, by the way.”

Bruce is not going to think about that. He is definitely NOT going to think about that. His ribs ache.

“You showed him sex tapes of me?” he demands instead, addressing the nearest terminal.

Text appears on the screen, green on a black background. It reads, “Bite Me.”


	3. In which Joker plays with chemicals

“Scandal wants an ETA on the plan,” Bruce says. “What should I tell her?”

“Tell her,” Joker says, enunciating the words carefully, “that you can’t hurry an artist.”

“Is that you way of saying you don’t have a plan yet?” Bruce demands.

“Oh Batsy, baby. I never have a plan. Hadn’t you realized that yet? But however I get us in, there’ll be one problem?”

“Which is?”

“Cameras. Cameras everywhere. How do you deal with cameras?” Joker asks. “I can get into Arkham no problem, but I can’t get us in unseen. Never much wanted to go anywhere unseen, but you’ve always been good at it.”

“These days cameras in Arkham are wireless,” Bruce says. He’s memorized everything he could find on the institute’s security. “To prevent escapees from just cutting the wires. I can configure a wireless frequency jammer to stop transmissions from all cameras in our vicinity. They won’t see us, but they’ll be able to track us via the camera blackouts. Otherwise the only option is to hack the system, and that’s no possible remotely. If I was in the control booth though, I might be able to put the camera feeds onto a loop, so they just show empty corridors. It won’t fool anyone looking for a glitch, but so long as no one looks too closely, it should work.”

Joker nods. “It all depends on which floor they’re keeping the dream eater on,” he says thoughtfully. “Once I know that, it’ll be taking candy from an angry, heavily armed baby.”

“You have a way to get through armed guards, steel shutters and concrete walls?” Bruce asks, though it’s a stupid question. None of those things have ever stopped Joker before, no reason they should suddenly be a problem for him now.

“Oh sure, I just need access to your lab and all those lovely chemicals.”

 

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
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It took three days of Joker insisting it was vital he do some experiments, and that he definitely 100% wouldn’t make any bombs at all, not even little ones, before Bruce grudgingly let Joker near his lab.

He doesn’t often do much in the way of science these days. He’d mostly only ever used it for analyzing the latest strains of Joker toxin, or Venom, and with Bane long dead and Joker in his care, he’s no need. If he needs information on the latest street drugs, he just makes sure the Gotham PD find some. These days their forensics division is excellent.

Joker doing science turns out to be one of the most terrifying things Bruce has ever seen. He doesn’t measure anything, pouring chemicals into beakers apparently at random, seemingly unphased when a particularly violent reaction results in a beaker exploding. He wipes the counter clean with the hem of his shirt, and when Bruce points out that several drops of the vividly green mixture have fallen on his arm, where they’re smoking and eating their way into his skin, he contorts himself until he can lick his arm clean. Bruce, used by now to Joker’s physical oddities, is totally unsurprised to find it doesn’t seem to do him any harm at all.

Bruce offers him goggles and a lab coat, but is waved away impatiently. When Bruce, in desperation, points out the danger to his suit (the shirt is a write off, the corrosive mixture he’d spilled earlier eating holes through it, but the jacket, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, is thus far unscathed) Joker responds by cheerfully removing both jacket and shirt.

His chest is pale and thin, the bat logo scar raised and livid. Bruce wonders what he’s been doing to it to keep it from fully healing. Wishing it that way, probably.

“What are we making,” Bruce asks, in an attempt to distract himself from Joker’s unexpected state of undress, peering at the motley collection of bottles and jars Joker’s collected around himself. (Bruce is perfectly capable of handling Joker in any state of undress, naturally. But these days he’s finding he needs a little warning to prepare himself if Joker is intending on appearing less than fully dressed. Or wearing his one red shirt, which matches both his eyes and his lipstick and which Bruce finds unaccountably distracting).

“I’m making Joker putty,” Joker says, steering him out of the way with surprising gentleness. His hands are soft and cool. “You’re keeping out of the way and looking pretty.”

It takes Bruce a minute to remember Joker putty, his mind still fixated on the unusual coolness of Joker’s skin. Is he always that cool, he finds himself wondering, or has he become chilled since undressing?

From what he remembers, Joker had only ever made a single batch of putty. It’s was a liquid that turned anything it touches into a kind of clay. After a few hours it hardened, but while still soft it was both malleable and bouncy. Joker had used it first to open a bank vault, then to remake a statue of one of Gotham’s founding fathers in his own image. Given how long ago that was, Bruce is amazed he remembers the recipe.

As it turns out, Joker doesn't remember the recipe. After several minutes of energetic science, he ends up with a beaker of dark green liquid. He examines it thoughtfully, tastes little, and then tips some of it onto the electron microscope. The microscope turns a vivid purple, and melts. With a snort of disgust, Joker throws the beaker into the sink, where it shatters, and begins mixing a new beaker-full. Behind him, the sink begins to slowly sag in the middle and drip purple liquid onto the floor below.

The second mixture comes out orange, and is tested, despite Bruce's objections, on the centrifuge. It turns orange, but retains its shape. But when Joker throws the beaker at it, it ricochets of the desk and bounces around the room for some time before Bruce is able to catch it.

Joker throws up his hands in disgust. "It's no good," he declares. "I can't work like this!"

Bruce looks about the out of date but beautifully appointed lab. "What's the problem? Do you need more chemicals?" His stock was good, but not everything keeps well, and he doesn't keep any radioactive elements in stock.

"Chemicals, Brucie, how am I supposed to work with chemicals?" Joker demands. "You think I ever had chemicals in Arkham?"

It's a fair point. Joker's approach to science is clearly far more intuitive than it is intellectual, it makes sense that he'd work better with products he's used to using.

"What do you need?" Bruce asks, resigned to more shopping. "Give me a list and I'll get them before I go on patrol."

"Hair dye," Joker says, ticking the items off on his long fingers, "Purple for preference, otherwise pink. A peat based fertilizer. Bleach, lemon scented. 15 chapsticks. 3 large erasers. A rubber ball, one of the really bouncy ones. And a lemon."

Bruce raises an eyebrow, but dutifully memorizes the list. "Anything you need for any other stages of the plan?" he asks. He'd rather get everything at once than have to go out in public dressed like a normal person twice in one week.

Joker thinks for a minute. He's developed a habit of sucking on his bottom lip when he's thinking hard about anything. Bruce has to force himself to look away.

"A USB to mains lead," he decides. "Big USB, not a mini one. A high-powered water pistol, as accurate as possible. All plastic too, no metal components beyond springs. A large joint of pork. Leg, preferably. A packet of glow in the dark stickers. Actually, make that two. Weed killer. A machete." He sees the look on Bruce's face. "You can carry it, if you like," he offers magnanimously. "But we'll need one. Tennis balls, at least two tubes. Firecrackers and lighter fuel." He sucks his lips thoughtfully. "I think that's everything."

Bruce mentally reviews the list. "I don't trust you with 90% of those things," he notes. "And I'm not sure about the other 10%."

Joker looks offended. "But I've been being so good!" he exclaims, sounding hurt.

"You stabbed me a fortnight ago. It needed four stitches."

"Exactly," Joker says. "I haven't stabbed you, or anyone else, for a whole fortnight. I don't know what more I can do to prove my trustworthiness!"

"Not make Joker gas," Bruce says. "And don't touch the machete." Not that Joker needs a weapon to be dangerous, he knows that all too well, but the idea of him wielding a foot long steel blade is terrifying.


	4. In which all is revealed... or not

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so this one is mostly self-indulgence. Sleepy Joker is adorable, and I am in love with BC (Bat Computer) and I wanted to get some other side bits of this world at least mentioned, so I wrote this. It's my fic, and I can do what I like! You're not even my real mom!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on weird comic book stuff you might not know:
> 
> Creeper is the alter-ego of journalist and reporter Jack Ryder. He's had a couple of different origins, so to specify which one I'm using here (and introduce him to people who don't know), Jack was investigating dodgy evil science shit, when he got injected with dodgy evil science. Said dodgy evil science should have given him shape-shifting abilities, but due to Jack's dubious mental state, he can only take one other form, that of the Creeper, the monster his mentally-ill mother used to tell him was waiting in the woods to kill him if he wasn't a good boy. He can heal himself, essentially because his body defaults to being the Creeper, and Creeper doesn't have any holes in him. How separate the two of them are, and how much control Jack has, varies depending on what's going on his life at the time. Also Creeper has a creepy laugh. So creepy it locks straight into the human brain's fear centres and basically paralyses people. Batman seems to be fairly resistant, and Joker is shown to be completely immune. (Joker and Creeper briefly team up in the comics and it's basically the most awesome thing ever).
> 
> The Tech is a semi-sentient mechanic organism (kind of like Marvel's TO virus) which briefly controlled Metropolis and had the mind of Lex Luthor's four year old daughter Lena. In this verse, the Tech never went away and Metropolis is now a dead zone inhabited by mind-controlled cyborgs that used to be real people until Lena tried to make them better. Only people with healing factors of some kind can last there for any length of time without being cyborg'd. Creeper lives there full time, because Lena likes him and he doesn't want to leave her all alone. He might be crazy, but he's not mean. Also someone has to stop supervillains from trying to weaponise her.
> 
> And finally, kudos to anyone who mentioned the brief hint in the last fic, yes, Red and the Wolf are Harley Quinn's kids (but not Joker's, he just experimented on them). They were raised by Stephanie Brown with the help and hindrance of the rest of the Bat family.

Power on. Run systems check. All systems online.

Print: Welcome to the Bat Computer. Please state your username.

Vocal input: Batman.

Running voice print analysis. Analysis complete. Username accepted.

Print: Good morning Batman. You have two new messages on the Oracle Network, and there is a high alert message to all officers on the GCPD system.

Vocal input: Show me the oracle messages. Actually, read them too me. I need to check the tyres on the Batmobile.

Processing input. Analysis complete. User: Batman wishes this unit to read the Oracle network messages aloud. Query

Print: You wish me to read the messages to you aloud?

Vocal input: Yes

Processing input. Analysis complete. User Batman wishes the two messages on the oracle system read aloud. Contradiction with previous orders. Orders, 27th June, 2049, from user: Batman, “shut up, God shut up, why did I give you her voice. Don’t speak, don’t ever speak again.” Analysing. Previous orders were given by user: Batman in a state of intoxication. This unit obeyed them out of fear of upsetting user: Batman. Conclusion: current orders override previous orders.

Speech: First message, dated April 30th, 1.56 am. From Network user Red. Message reads: How are you Uncle Bruce? Haven’t seen you out patrolling much recently. Me and Wolf are going to Metropolis next Thursday. Creeper is having problems with the Brotherhood of Ma'aleca'andra again, and he’s put out the call to all the Supers who can survive Lena. I seriously don’t know what those green bastards think they’d even do with the Tech if they got it! I don’t know how long we’ll be gone, but could you keep an eye on Tricorner for us? I know you will anyway, but there’s been some Street Demon activity I’m concerned about, and there’s rumours that the Dogs of War are in the area, though we haven’t seen any sign of them yet. Wolf sends his love. We’ll see you when we get back. Message ends. Do you wish to send a reply?

Vocal input: Yes. Tell her the Demons are trying to build an alliance with the Lo Boyz, but it will fail. I will watch Tricorner for them. My sources suggest that Alpha at least is in Star City, but they are not reliable. I will look out for the Dogs. Oh, and give her my love.

Processing input. Analysis complete. Composing message: ‘Red – Of course I will watch over Tricorner. I will look out for the Dogs of War, but my intel suggests they are in Star City for the moment. The Lo Boyz and the Street Demons are negotiating a treaty, but it will not hold. And the Brotherhood probably want the tech to try and make themselves an AI as awesome as the Bat Computer. All my love, stay safe.’ Sending message. Message sent.

Speech: Reply sent. Second message, dated May 1st 3.47pm. From Network user Vengeance. Message reads: How is the plan going? Any luck with our mutual friend? We need to move soon. I have my obligations to her. Message ends. Would you like to send a reply?

Vocal input: Tell her Thursday. We’ll go on Thursday.

Processing input. Analysis complete. Composing message: ‘Everything will be ready by Thursday. Is Thursday night acceptable?’ Sending message. Message sent.

Speech: Reply sent.

Data: Go West airs at 8:00pm Thursday. It is followed by Make me a Match and Dancing in the Stars. Joker has watched every episode of these shows that has aired since he came to the Batcave. Data: Batman wishes to break into Arkham on Thursday night. Conflicting data.

Speech: Joker will not be happy.

Vocal input: Joker can put up with it.

Processing input. Analysis complete. Conclusion: Joker will be very unhappy.

 

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Joker is still asleep, curled up in the nest of blankets and Bruce’s old clothes that he calls a bed. His head is tucked into the crook of his arm, only a wild mop of green hair visible above the blankets.

Bruce prods him with the toe of a boot, not hard enough to be a kick, but not gently. Joker shifts slightly, his hair splaying out against the pillow in a green arc, and makes a soft disgruntled noise. He doesn’t wake. Bruce prods him again, and again, less gently, but still he elicits no more response than a small noise and a shifting of position.

Sighing, he crouches down, and takes Joker’s shoulder in his hand, intending to shake him awake. Instead he feels a tight grip on his wrist, and long legs wrap around his own, and then he’s being flipped, landing on his bank on the blankets, Joker straddling his hips. He’s wearing one of Bruce’s tee-shirts as, as best Bruce can tell without looking, no underwear.

Delicately, Joker takes Bruce’s pinky finger in his own, shifting his grip until he’s satisfied.

“There,” he says, sounding pleased. “Now, if you try and escape, I’ll break your finger.” And then he relaxes, sliding his body down Bruce's, creating friction in places Bruce is determinedly not thinking about, and tucking his head under Bruce's chin, green hair tickling his nose and ears. His body is warm and soft with sleepy lassitude, no sign of the alertness and speed of a moment ago in his limbs.

"Not that this isn’t lovely,” Joker says, and even his voice is soft with sleep, “but why are you in my bed?”

Bruce doesn’t bother pointing out that it was Joker who put him there. It’s not like he doesn’t know that. Instead he just says, “Red and the Wolf leave Gotham on Thursday. That’s when we move.”

"But Thursday is jello and dating shows night!" Joker protests, raising his head just enough to glare at Bruce. "Why can't it be Friday?"

"Because I don't know how long they'll be gone, and I wont risk doing this while they're in town," Bruce says, irritated that he needs to explain this. Joker understands, he knows he does, no one is more pragmatic than Joker. It's just that he's also the most self-obsessed person on the planet. "We have Tivo." The Bat Computer had signed him up for it without his permission about three days after he brought Joker in. He'd ended up buying her nine grands worth of new hardware as thanks.

"Okay, but," Joker says, returning his head to its previous possition, "you have to watch them with me. And eat jello."

Bruce doesn't like jello, but saying so just seems churlish, so he mutters, "As long as we move on Thursday, I'll watch whatever you want."

"Promise?"

"Promise." Scandal is going to owe him so many favours after this.

“Okay, but can we just stay here till then?” Joker asks, wriggling in an apparent attempt to get even closer. “There’s nothing we need to do, right?”

The idea is horrifyingly appealing. Outside it’s cold and wet, and Joker makes a surprisingly comfortable blanket.

“I need to know your plan,” he says instead. “I’m meeting Scandal tonight to brief her.”

Joker shifted, moving his head to Bruce’s shoulder and letting go of his now numb pinky. Bruce waited patiently, knowing that Joker would tell him eventually. He could never resist showing off. Then without warning, sharp teeth, too sharp for someone apparently human, sank into his earlobe, hard and startling enough that his body jack-knifed, nearly hard enough to throw Joker off him.

“I hope you know you’re going to owe me for this, Batsy,” he says, his voice low and threatening. “I will expect repayment.”

“Tell me your plan,” Bruce says, rather than answer. He is all too aware of the debt he will owe Joker, and he’s doing his best not to think about the potentially awful consequences.

Joker sits up, pillow ruffled hair sticking out from his head like a vividly green halo. “You’d better pay attention then,” he says, sounding pleased with himself. “I’m only going to explain this once.”


	5. Stage One

_"We approach the Island by boat, at eight forty pm. The perimeter guard shift changes at nine, so the ones on guard will be tired and bored. We head for the north side of the Island, at a point just below tower five. Row boat, or silenced engine, or they’ll hear us coming. As small a boat as possible."_

 

 

Scandal is good. Very good. When he first arrives at the quay, he completely fails to see her, thinks how unlike her it is to be late. And then, suddenly, there she is, melting out of the shadows that had been concealing her. Bruce is impressed.

“It’s true then,” she says, voice low and soft in a way that’s far less carrying than a whisper. Bruce doesn’t need to see her face to know she’s staring at Joker. “I wasn’t sure.”

Joker bows, his usually flamboyant movements restricted by the bag that’s slung over his shoulder and the enormous orange water pistol he’s carrying. He’s wearing his best suit, make-up carefully applied, and it’s only the length of his hair that marks him as being in any way changed from the monster of Bruce’s youth. “At your service, madam,” he says, and Bruce just knows this is going to go horribly wrong.

Scandal obviously agrees, because she stares at Joker for a long moment, and then says, “This is important to me. More important than you can know. If you do anything, anything at all, to sabotage this mission, or put Sopporro in danger, Batman will not be able to protect you. Do you understand?”

“Don’t you think you’re being a little melodramatic?” Joker asks, in his most irritating sing-song voice. “Why don’t you calm down a little, dear. I’m sure we’ll all be friends…”

The blades of the Laminas Pesar make almost no noise as they slide out of their sheathes, but it’s enough to stop Joker in his tracks. His eyes flick to Bruce, unsure of his protection, and he obviously doesn’t like what he sees. Not that Bruce would let him get seriously hurt, but really, a few cuts and bruises might knock some sense into him.

“I have even less reason to get us caught than you do, Vengeance,” Joker says, voice hard. “You think I want to go back to that place? After what IGA… I’m here as a favour to Batsy, and because it’s a challenge. I’ve got no obligation to you. You don’t want my help, just say the word.”

Vengeance nods, apparently satisfied. “That’s what I hoped you’d say,” she says, still completely calm. “Let’s go.”

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

The boat is Wayne Industries manufactured, one of the matt black dinghies they produced for the military back in the early 21st century. The originals had had petrol engines, impressively quiet for the time, but hardly suitable for today’s mission. Bruce has spent the last two days working on this one, replacing the engine with a hydroelectric motor that’s almost totally silent, and streamlining the prow to reduce splash noise.

Joker had smashed a bottle of perfectly good whiskey over the prow (Bruce never used to drink, used to do all he could to avoid it, but now it’s no longer something he associates with pretending to be something he’s not, he finds he enjoys the odd drink, provided it’s really good quality scotch) and christened the boat Marcel. It’s painted on the side, in dark purple paint. Bruce had considered pointing out that boats were traditionally female, but decided that would be too much like going along with Joker’s idiocy, so he ignored it.

Joker takes a seat at the prow, where he can give directions to Bruce at the tiller. Scandal sits in the middle, hands folded demurely in her lap, and stares out at the ocean.

There used to be a bridge to the island, back when Bruce was still a regular visitor, but the coastline has eroded, leaving Arkham stranded alone on its little rock, reachable only by boat or helicopter. The tabloid press do good business out of reporting on the broken bodies of escapees that regularly wash up on the rocks of the Gotham shoreline. From what Joker has told him, Bruce suspects not all of them are escapees.

Joker had swum it, on his final escape, still in his straightjacket, arms free but the fabric weighing him down. He’d been delirious with fever for days afterwards, the filthy water of Gotham bay infecting the wounds he’d been covered with, and Bruce had all but forgotten his own injuries in his desperate attempts to save him. It was the most vulnerable Bruce had even seen his nemesis, maybe the most vulnerable he’d ever seen anyone, and he’d sworn to himself that he was never again taking anyone to that hellish place.

He’s taking the long route, circling around the island rather than crossing the strait directly, in the hope of avoiding detection. Sea-spray hits their faces, so cold it feels like needles piercing his skin, and Scandal is trying to conceal a shiver.

Joker, on the other hand, is leaning out over the prow, like a dog sticking it’s head out of the car window, eyes fixed on the looming forms of the Asylum buildings above them. Bruce wonders what he’s thinking, whether he’s glad to be going back to the place that was practically his home for so many years, or whether he’s having to fight off the ghosts of dark memories, the way Bruce is.

“The sea here, it smells of death,” Scandal says, her voice completely without inflection.

She’s right. There’s a wrong note to the scent, something mixed in with the scents of salt and the industrial pollution, that reminds Bruce of the time when he was a child that his parents took him to the beach, only to find it covered in the corpses of thousands of jellyfish, their bodies slowly liquefying in the summer sun.

His father had turned it into a science lesson, he remembers, using a stick to point out the different parts of the jellyfish’s anatomy, and to explain the food chain, while his mother wrinkled her nose and tried to persuade him that they should go elsewhere. It had rained, later, and they’d eaten lunch-meat sandwiches sitting in the car.

“According to the American Association of Psychiatric Care,” Joker says, raising his voice a little to be heard over the waves, “a best practise institute should have a death rate of no more than 5% annually. That’s a hard one to live up too, but no one outside IGA ever checks whether the cells actually contain the patients they say they do, or even any patients at all. So they throw most of the bodies into the sea, and report a very respectable 4.3% mortality rate among their long term guests.”

“And no-one checks?” Scandal asks, sounding more disappointed than surprised.

“On the big name patients, sure. They wheel out that new pretty-boy Scarecrow, and Maxie, and whoever the hell Scarface is working with these days, and no-one ever thinks to ask about the nobodies. People forget, you see, that Arkham is a hospital, not just a Supervillain holding pen. No one ever thinks to check on the people who’ve never fought against Batsy here.”

“It’s a good idea,” Scandal says. “Their guarantee of no animal testing is a big selling point for IGA products. Liana used to use their face cream.”

“Definitely financially viable,” Joker agrees. “It’s what I’d do, if I were running an evil Pharmaceuticals Conglomerate.”

“What you’d do,” Bruce says with the certainty of long experience, “is spike all the products with Joker toxin.”

“Well obviously,” Joker agrees. “But I’d test them on mental patients first.”

The shadow of the Asylum falls over the boat, and they all go silent as Bruce carefully negotiates his way through the treacherous rock-filled waters, only Joker’s emphatic hand-gestures to guide him safely through.

Above them, the pointed roof of one of the guard towers is just visible. Joker points to it, and holds up four fingers. Bruce nods and steers the boat left, hugging the shoreline at closely as he can.

Suddenly the boat rocks with Joker’s movement, flinging up his hands in the universal gesture of ‘stop’. Bruce kills the engine, and they sit, silent and unmoving, as a search light illumines the water only inches in front of them. Bruce can just make out the voices of a the guards, a low murmur above the sounds of the sea.

The searchlight moves on, and they follow it, staying just out of range of the beam, but getting at close as Bruce dares. Joker holds up his hands, and begins folding down his fingers one at a time, silently counting down the distance to their destination. At two, Bruce slows the boat to a crawl, his eyes searching the cliff-face for any sign of an entrance.

“Here,” Joker says, his voice so soft it’s barely audible, and Bruce just makes out, seven or eight feet above them, a disk of dull grey metal set into the side of the cliff. Bruce brings the boat in as close to the cliff as he can, so that the wet rock is close enough to touch, and concentrates on keeping their position steady.

Joker passes the bag he’d been carrying to Bruce, and his shoes and socks to a bemused Scandal, and slings the strap of the water pistol across his body, making sure it’s safely secured at the small of his back. Bruce hands him the mooring line, a new one made of the same alloy as the cable of his grapnel, and Joker’s gone, scampering up the cliff like a monkey, hands and feet unerringly finding places to rest on the sheer cliff-face.

Bruce has to force himself not to look away when Joker stands for a minute unsupported, only his long toes keeping him anchored, while he attaches the mooring line to the rock with a pinion. And then he’s off again, moving faster than Bruce have believed possible for a man without ropes on so slippery a surface.

He stops above the door, hanging from a tiny crevice of the rock one handed, feet braced against the frame, as he fumbles for the water pistol.

Joker Putty, he’d explained to Bruce, didn’t work on most plastics. They weren’t dense enough. It needed something really solid, like a steel security door, to really work.

Bruce holds his breath, transfixed with fear and disbelief, when Joker finished coating the door, and swings himself down and round, headed feet first towards the door, no way to catch himself if the putty hasn’t worked.

Joker punches through the remains of the door, leaving a hole his exact size and shape, like a cartoon. Bruce lets out a breath, and Scandal huffs an almost silent laugh.

“We should have known he could do it,” she says, clearly amused. “He would not risk his life for me unless he was certain he would survive.”

Bruce, throat still frozen with shock, can only nod.


	6. Stage Two

_"The caves where they used to keep Croc in are only a small part of the network. Arkham Island’s practically a swiss cheese. Once we’re in, we can get to the main building no problem without ever needing to go above ground."_

 

 

The grey putty that used to be the steel door smells of garlic and violets, which is an unpleasant combination, but better than the dank rotten smell of the tunnel.

“Four times I got out this way,” Joker says fondly, patting the tunnel wall as Bruce helps Scandal haul herself up the final few feet. “They just kept changing the gates and hoping no one did it again.”

Joker’s suspicions that the new corporate owners of the asylum wouldn’t know, or care, about the tunnels that riddle the island seemed to be being proved correct. The air smells stale, like it has lain unmoving for decades, and the door Joker had reduced to a grey blob had been sturdy, but nearly fifty years old, if Bruce is any judge.

Bruce turns on the lights imbedded into the palms of the Bat suit’s gloves, and Scandal produces a small head-torch from her belt-pouch.

A faint, very faint, glow catches Bruce’s eye, and he turns to see that Joker is holding one of the packets of glow in the dark stickers. He’d requested stars, but the shop had sold out, so Bruce had had to do the best he could. The packet Joker’s holding is full of pink sparkly unicorns, their manes and hooves glowing a sickly green.

“A little tacky,” Joker says, looking at them critically, “but still better than magic string.”

He sticks one onto the wall by his head. It glows softly in the half-light of their torches.

“You don’t know the way?” Vengeance asks, looking at the little pink unicorn. “I thought you had done this before?”

“Oh, lots of times,” Joker says, waving a hand vaguely. “Just want to make sure we can find our way out again in a hurry. Should anything happen.”

“Optimistic,” Vengeance says, but her tone is light.

“Always,” Joker agrees. “Now follow me.”

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

The tunnels are damp, and stone slick underfoot, and Bruce has to concentrate to avoid slipping over. Joker’s moving fast, unconcerned as to whether they’re keeping up with him, only pausing when he decrees it time to place another sticker. 

After about five minutes they come out of the narrow tunnel and into a large cavern. Scandal stretches, the lamentation blades glistening in the light on her head-torch. She might be fighting for good now, but she's still Vandal Savages' favourite child, and she's never without her signature weapons.

“Put the pork down anywhere,” Joker says. He turns to face the darkness of the cavern, calling, “Only me, Croccy-boy. Enjoy the pig!”

“Was that really necessary,” Bruce asks, amused by this superstition on Joker’s part. He hadn’t minded carrying the large lump of raw pork particularly, it was awkward, but not especially heavy, but he might have complained more if he’d known it was only needed to pacify ghosts from Joker’s past.

“Do you know how long mutant crocodile people live?” Joker demands. “Because I don’t. And Croc never did like me. Better safe than eaten alive by saurian gangsters, that’s what I always say.”

That, Bruce has to concede, is a reasonable point.

He’s been into Croc’s tunnels before, decades ago, and what he remembers of them is a bewildering maze, stinking sickeningly of rotting meat. The smell is better now, but the place is just as dark and labyrinthine as he remembers.

Bruce’s and Scandal’s torches turn the darkness close to them into deep shadow, but Joker strides ahead in the almost perfect darkness, apparently completely certain of his route. Bruce wonders idly how many times before Joker has walked the tunnels in darkness, and how many times he’s run them, pursued by an angry Croc.

Joker is visible only as flashes of colour and movement when Bruce and Scandal’s lights land on him, but they can follow the sound of his feet, splashing in the shallow water and echoing off the silent walls, easily enough. He crosses the cavern they entered by, a space as big at the great hall of Wayne Manor, and then enters a tunnel, and then another and another, the paths twisting too much for Bruce to remember their route clearly. He is completely reliant on Joker’s mercy, and it’s an unsettling feeling. More than once he wonders if he’s being lead to his death, but Scandal seems unafraid, and he is loathe to show any weakness in front of her.

The tunnels must be sloping gently downwards, since the water levels are rising. By the time Joker halts, a black shape against the black walls, the water is above Bruce’s knees, and Scandal is up to her thighs.

“Up we go, boys and girls,” Joker says, and leaps, disappearing into the darkness.

Bruce calls his name, but the only reply is a faint laugh, seemingly coming from miles about their heads, though Bruce knows even Joker couldn’t have leapt more than a few feet. He swears and Scandal shakes her head.

“He’s fit, for a dead man,” she says. “Give me a boost up.”

He laces his fingers together, and she places a surprisingly dainty combat boot into his hand and allows him to boost her up towards the ceiling.

“Feels like a lift shaft,” she says. “I’m going up. Can you follow?”

“I’ll grapple up,” Bruce says. “Watch out.”

The grapnel imbeds itself in something solid. Bruce tests the strength, and then presses the button to reel it back in.

There’s a pale light filtering down the lift shaft, just enough that Bruce can make out the silhouette of Scandal, a darker shadow against the dark wall, without needing to use his gauntlet lights. Now they’re nearing the main building, he doesn’t want to risk any artificial light  
.  
“There’s no ladder,” Scandal says. “And your friend’s already gone.” She doesn’t sound especially worried, and Bruce feels his own mood being lifted by her calm confidence.

“We’ll catch him up,” he says. “He can’t have gone far, and the last thing he wants is to be left behind here. He’s just showing off.”

“Well he can count me suitable impressed,” Scandal says, amiably. Knockout has been good for her, Bruce thinks. The vague memories he has of her during her Secret Six days are of a woman brimming over with anger, her rage barely kept in check by her iron self-control. Vengeance is a much more amiable character, prepared to live in the moment, and enjoy the small pleasures of life.

“My grapnel will carry both of us,” Bruce says. “If you don’t mind being carried.”

Her teeth gleam white when he grins. “If you think you’re up to it, old man,” she says, her voice tinged with laughter, “then I’m willing.”

Her body is soft and warm in his arms, and she smells of Lilly of the Valley soap and just a little fresh sweat. He can’t feel anything through his gloves, but he doesn’t need to to know that her skin will be slightly chill to the touch, cooled by the cold underground, and as smooth as silk. She locks strong legs around his hips, totally trusting in his ability to support her, and he thinks with a pang of nostalgia that, once upon a time, he could have fallen in love with her.

“How’s Knockout,” he asks, in an effort to distract himself from how her weight feels in his arms. She’s lighter than Joker would be, but just as strong, and it’s too easy to forget that the hands on his shoulders are small and tanned rather than long and pale. It’s been so long, just the two of them, that he’s not disgusted, or even surprised, that he finds himself comparing this beautiful woman to the monster he lives with.

The grapnel finds a clear path, straight up the centre of the shaft, jerking the gun almost out of his hand as the pinion imbeds itself in something high above. He reels it in, just enough to lift his feet an inch off the floor, and is satisfied when it doesn’t so much at creak. He begins to reel them in, slower than before as the line takes the strain of the extra weight.

“She is well. She spends much of her time at the orphanage we founded in Liana’s memory. I think she is broody for children of her own, though she denies it. I would make a poor mother, but she is a natural, and it brings me great joy to see her so happy.”

Bruce isn’t sure what to say to this candid answer. He’d expected vague pleasantries. But there’s something about Vengeance, something in her forthright manner and complete common sense that invited confidences. “I have often regretted that I wasn't a better parent,” he admits. “But I have never once regretted the presence of my children in my life. They made me a better man than I thought I could be.”

“You didn’t do so bad a job,” Vengeance says as they alight on a gantry near the top of the shaft. “They were good people, your children, and they loved you. There is little better recommendation for a parent than that.”

There's a small hole in the metal side of the lift shaft beside the platform they’re standing on, apparently far too small for any man to fit through, though presumably Joker had managed to squeeze through somehow since he's nowhere to be seen.

The air smells thickly of violet and garlic, and when Bruce pushes his fingers against the wall he finds it’s soft and malleable. He pulls the hole wider until there's enough room for he and Scandal to squeeze through.

The room on the other side is a large ante-room of some kind, the concrete walls almost invisible beneath layers of algae and spider webs. The air is as moist here as it had been in the tunnels and smells strongly of damp.

Joker is lounging against the far wall, waiting for them. His eyes take in the supportive hand Bruce has on Scandal's back and narrow dangerously.

"If you're quite done with your little heart to heart," he hisses, voice acidic, "I thought we were here to do a job, not gossip!"

He stalks over to the eastern wall, and begins feeling along it, long fingers tapping out a samba rhythm as he leans close to the wall to listen to the echoes. At last he finds what it is he's listening for and unslings the water pistol from his back. He aims it carefully, pausing regularly to push his fingers into the now malleable wall to check for something.

He's melting fairly high up the wall, and once the hole begins to grow, Bruce realises he's carefully melting the wall but leaving the wires and pipes behind it intact. It's a new experience for Bruce to be Joker being so carefully, rather than just casually destructive, and he's finding it disconcerting.

Joker steps back, admiring the neat hole. "Ladies first," he says, gesturing to Scandal.

"If you attempt to attack me," she says, stepping up to the hole and hoisting herself up, "I will castrate you."

Joker shrugs. "Seems fair," he says. He doesn't seem in the least offended, either by the threat or the insinuation that he was going to try attacking her, which suggests that he had been. Bruce sighs. He doesn't understand why Joker can't just take advantage of people like a normal Supervillain, instead of stabbing them for no reason.

Bruce has a moment of crisis where he can't decide if it's better to have Joker where he can see him, or keep him a long way away from Scandal, who he seems to have taken an intense dislike to. It only takes him a second though to decide that he's never willingly let Joker out of his site before, and he's not going to stop now. Scandal can look after herself.


	7. Stage Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ETN: Electronically Transferred Network. In this future, internet is actually built into mains electricity supplies, so to connect, you just need to plug in. (Obviously there are also wireless networks, but since they're less reliable, big institutions like Arkham usually use an ETN).
> 
> And in case anyone didn't know, Scandal was in a poly relationship with Liana (a totally human stripper) and Knockout (an apocalyptian fury). The three of them were married. In this future Liana is long dead, but Knockout's still around. She's just not much good on stealth missions.

_IGA aren't allowed to touch the old Arkham apartments, orders of the Gotham Historical Society. So when they took over the manor, they just closed them off, and built new offices. That's our first stop, Amadeus Arkham's office. With Vengeance's help, we can find out where they're keeping Soporo. Much better than trying to interrogate a guard, or break into the main offices._

 

The space inside the wall is low and narrow, forcing Bruce and Scandal to move in a sort of crouching shuffle. Joker, apparently uncaring about the potential damage to his new trousers, crawls along on all fours. His shoes, hanging around his neck with the laces knotted behind the back of his neck, banging against his chest as he crawls.

"Where are we?" Scandal asks, after a minute or two.

"Arkham manor," Joker says. "Sub sub basement level. They used to keep prisoners down here, back in the good old days, before they built the new blocks."

"And what are we doing here?" Scandal demands. "You said yourself, there's no prisoners in the manor anymore, only offices."

"Wait and see," Joker singsongs. Bruce is certain he's only keeping it to himself to be annoying.

After what Bruce's brain knows is less than five minutes, but his thigh muscles insist is at least an hour, Joker stops, so abruptly that Bruce walks into him. Kneeling up a little, and turning on one of the gauntlet lights, he's able to see why. The tunnel stops abruptly in front of them, turning through 90% and continuing straight up.

Scandal stands up, onto her tiptoes, back curving like a cat’s, and imbeds the three shorter lamentation blades into the walls either side of her head and walks her feet up until she’s braced, back against one wall, feet against the opposite one.

Joker shuffles forward then raises himself to a crouch, twisting his neck to he can watch her make her way up the shaft. “Now that’s a nice view,” he says, and Bruce can tell from his tone of voice that he’s just saying it in the hope of getting a rise out of one of them.

There’s a thud, and Joker gives a little yelp of surprise and then breaks into peals of manic laughter. There’s a throwing star imbedded in the floor, between his splayed fingers.

“Only Knockout gets to say things like that,” Scandal’s voice says, from high above.

"I'll go first," Bruce says quickly, before Joker can respond. He recognises the dangerous glint in Joker's eyes. He might be laughing, but he doesn't like anyone getting one over on him.

It takes some seriously undignified manoeuvring to pass Joker in the cramped tunnel. Joker, unsurprisingly, takes the chance to grope Bruce as thoroughly as the Batsuit will allow. By the time he's crouching in front of the madman, looking up at Scandal silhouetted in the light of her head torch, Bruce is feeling thoroughly violated.

It's slow progress, the shaft too narrow for him to be able to get a good grip with his feet, leaving his arms to take the strain. Scandal is moving faster, her small size giving her better leverage.

Below him, Bruce hears Joker, his voice amused, say, "Now that's an even better view." Bruce ignores him.

They climb in silence for several minutes, Bruce studiously ignoring the strain on his muscles and Joker's almost sub-vocal muttering (because when it comes to Joker, silence is a relative term). Then Scandal's voice floats down from above. "This is the top. There's a vent."

"What does it smell of?" Joker calls back.

"Dust, mildew, rats," Scandal replies. "And a faint hint of boiled cabbage."

"Can you move the vent cover?" Joker asks. "No one will hear you down here."

"In that case," Scandal replies, "no problem."

Bruce watches her shifting silhouette as she wedges herself more firmly in the shaft, leaving her hands free to force the vent cover up and out, the screws making a horrible nails-on-a-blackboard noise as they're forced out of their threads. The crash as the cover lands on the floor of the room above is shockingly loud after the quiet of the shaft, and Bruce has to lock his muscles to keep from visibly flinching.

Bruce hauls himself out after Scandal, then reaches back to help Joker out. His skin is icy cold, enough that Bruce can feel it through his gauntlets, and he weighs almost nothing, barely more than Scandal.

They're in what looks like an abandoned kitchen, marble worktops covered in a thick layer of dust, and the air musty and, as Scandal had said, smelling faintly of cabbage.

"The management get food sent up from the canteen," Joker says, running a finger along the stove top. "No one needed the kitchen anymore, so they shut it up. They missed a few key points though."

In the wall above the counter is a metal door.

"Garbage chute?" Scandal asks, looking at it.

"Oh no honey, it's a whole lot better than that," Joker says, bouncing on his toes. “Tell him Brucie."

"Dumb waiter," Bruce says. "A lift, straight up into the main part of the building."

"And what's up there?" she asks, watching Joker prise the door open and fold himself into the dumbwaiter.

"Knowledge, dear, what else?"

The electrics that once powered the lift were cut long ago, but the cables run through the back of the box and Joker hauls them hand over hand, until the box disappears from view. Bruce is wary of letting Joker go ahead alone, but there's barely room for one (and Bruce is already dreading the ascent, given the Joker had had to fold himself up like a piece of origami to fit, and he's considerably thinner than Bruce).

While they wait, Bruce checks the contents of the bag he’s still wearing slung over one shoulder. The machete is there, along with six tennis balls, all smelling faintly of raw pork, and the spray bottle of biological weed killer. He has only a vague idea what most of the things are actually for, because Joker’s explanation of the plan had been an outline at best (and Bruce suspects that’s all Joker himself knows) but it’s reassuring to know that they’re all still there, even if they are heavy and awkward to carry.

There’s a rushing noise, and a thunk, and the dumbwaiter arrives back at the bottom of the shaft.

“I’ll go first,” he says quickly, not wanting Scandal and Joker to be alone together, no matter for how brief a time. “Will you take the bag? I’m going to have enough trouble getting in there as it is.”

She takes it from him, and Bruce begins the uncomfortable process of folding himself into a space never intended to hold anything larger than a few plates. It’s not impossible, his study of escapology has made his joint exceedingly flexible, but it’s unpleasant, and the wire cable grates against his hip as he hauls himself up.

The door at the top is open, and he falls through it gratefully, before letting go of the cables, letting the box drop back down for Scandal.

Bruce considers himself a brave man, and he is certainly not sensitive to atmosphere, but Amadeus Arkham's office (and despite having been used by four generations of the family, it's undoubtedly still Amadeus' office) is the creepiest place he's ever been. The hairs on the back of his neck are standing up, and he can feel his skin tensing into goose bumps. Behind him he hears Scandal suck in a breathe of surprise as she climbs out of the dumbwaiter.

The furniture is Victorian, ornately carved mahogany and dark green leather. A desk stands in the centre of the room, almost comically large and imposing. The leather of the desk top is dry and cracked, covered in a thick layer of dust. The walls are covered by floor to ceiling bookcases, their shelves mostly empty, the few remaining books mouldering with age, looking lost and alone in the large shelves. There are specimen glasses too, indistinct shapes floating in green clouds of the formaldehyde. A stuffed foxes head snarls down from above the filthy window, glass eyes glinting in the torch-light. It looks like it's in pain.

Joker is rummaging in the drawers of the oversized desk, apparently unaware of the oppressive atmosphere of evil that fills the room. Bruce thinks it's no wonder the Arkhams tended to be mentally unstable. Amadeus' dark obsession has tainted this room, soaked into the walls and infected the very air.

"Foooound it," Joker singsongs, waving his prize triumphantly. It's a laptop computer, of the kind commonly made in 2020s, slim and sleek for the time, though unimaginably large and clunky by modern standards.

Joker produces a coiled USB lead from the pocket of his pants, and plugs it into the laptop, and the other end into a main socket. It takes a long tense minute of charging, and then the laptop slowly crackles to life.

"Left that here, back when IGA first closed off the old Arkham apartments," Joker says, sounding smug. "I knew it would come in handy eventually."

"So we have a computer," Scandal says, dismissively. "So what?"

"So, this building might not be used much, but it's still part of the ETN. And now, so is this laptop. This laptop that is too old and decrepit for anyone to notice its presence in the system. What this means, Scandal dear, is that we now have access to the Arkham Institute Intranet. Which is where you come in."

Scandal smiles and sets down the bag. “It’s been a while since I had to actually hack something. Let’s see how much I remember.”

While she works, fingers flying across the keyboard with impressive speed, Joker browses the shelves. There’d never been any doubt that Scandal could do it. She was the Secret Six’s computers expert long before she was one of their fighters, and she’s one of the most intelligent people Bruce knows.

“Are you sure about the next stage?” Bruce asks Joker, coming to join him in examining one of the jars. It contains a pair of conjoined foetuses, their tiny eyes still sealed shut, not yet developed.

“Darling, the only things I’ve ever been sure of is you and me. And that slapstick will never get old. But this will work. My plans always do, one way and another.”

“It’s the other that’s worrying me,” Bruce says dryly, and Joker laughs softly. He leans back, resting his weight on Bruce chest, and says, “Two weeks Batsy. Two whole weeks since I last tried to seriously injure you. You ought to trust me by now.”

“It’s been ten days,” Bruce corrects him. “And you threatened to break my finger on Tuesday.”

“Oh, that was just pillow talk,” Joker says, twisting his head to give Bruce a wide smile.

“And I thought Knockout was the only one who said things like that in bed,” Scandal says dryly. “I’m into the system.”

Joker claps his hands together happily. “Wonderful. The information you’ll need will be on Walsh’s computer. It’ll be on other people’s as well, but when they trace the hack, and they will, eventually, I want it be his computer that was compromised.”

“I can make it look like it came from him, if you like,” Scandal offers. “It wouldn’t be hard. Once you’re in their system, the securities laughable.”

“Do that,” Joker says, “and I’ll forgive you for flirting with my Bat.”

Bruce wants to protest, but he’s not sure whether he should object first to the idea that Scandal was flirting with him, or to the idea of his belonging to Joker, and while he’s figuring it out, Scandal speaks first. “Deal,” she says.

Joker grins at her.

“I’m not your property, Joker,” Bruce hisses.

“Oh baby, sure you are. ‘Cos I’m your property, got the marks and everything, and that’s got to work both ways, otherwise it’s slavery, and you’re supposed to be the hero around here. Although,” he adds, pursing his lips and tipping his head on one side, “the idea’s not entirely repellent.”

“At least if I had you collared I could attach a lead,” Bruce agrees. “Stop you running off all the time.”

Joker laughs, far louder than Bruce thinks is wise when trespassing. “Batsy, baby, if you were that kind of fun I wouldn’t keep running away!”

“D Block,” Scandal says, before Bruce can work out how he’s supposed to reply to that. “Cell 448.”

“Oh goodie,” Joker says, grinning. “Maximum security!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm very needy. I live for your comments.


	8. Stage Four (part 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Back in the 2030s, there was this big drive to make the asylum all eco friendly. One of the things they did was start using the water from the showers in D block to water the plants in the Botanical gardens, and the pipes are really quite big. More than big enough for me to wonder out along them whenever I fancied some fresh air._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long! I couldn't work out how to get them to the greenhouse. Damn Joker and his inconsistent planning!
> 
> Brief note on the layout of Arkham: It's primarily based on the layout used in the Arkham Asylum video game, since that's the only time we've had access to a map of the place. The Asylum in that is very different from the way it appears in the comics, but I liked the layout, and it made sense, so I'm using it as a rough base for this story. In particular the Greenhouses/Botanical Gardens are taken directly from the game, since I'm pretty certain they've never appeared in anything else before.
> 
> The quote on the gravestones is from Romans 6:23. It seemed depressing enough to be something the management of Arkham would like.

_Back in the 2030s, there was this big drive to make the asylum all eco friendly. One of the things they did was start using the water from the showers in D block to water the plants in the Botanical gardens, and the pipes are really quite big. More than big enough for me to wonder out along them whenever I fancied some fresh air._

 

“So,” Scandal says, looking expectantly at the Joker. “What now?”

“Now we break into the Botanical Gardens,” Joker says.

“Okay,” Scandal agrees. “The Botanical Gardens are the other side of the Island. How exactly are we supposed to get there unseen?”

Joker sighs loudly, like he’s deeply disappointed in her, and throws up his hands.”I can hardly be expected to think of everything, now can I?” he demands. “I got you this far, isn’t that enough?”

“Joker,” Bruce asks, keeping his voice carefully neutral, “Do you really not have a plan for this bit?”

Joker rolls his eyes. "Well I did, but I don't think you'll like it," he says, sounding sulky.

"Tell me."

"We jump out of the window and run like hell for the greenhouses and hope we get there without being shot," Joker says with a shrug.

Scandal sighs deeply. "We're supposed to be getting in unseen," she says, annoyed.

"I told Batsy, right at the start, unseen is not my speciality! I told him! I am not a naturally sneaky person!" He looks genuinely distressed, and Bruce pats him vaguely on the shoulder.

"Once we're in the greenhouses, your plan is good from there?" he asks.

"My plan is perfect. No one will see us, no one will hear us."

"Well that's okay then," Bruce says, relaxing a little. "We just need to get across the Island."

He goes through his pouches methodically, considering and rejecting each gadget until he finds what he needs. One of his sonic emitters, specially designed to shatter glass. No human will be able to hear it (the Arkham guards don't have dogs, not after the inmates managed to get hold of one during IGA’s first riot) and if he's really careful, he should even be able to get the shards to fall inwards rather than outwards.

He considers the window, calculating angles and tensions, and then he sets the little microphone on one of the struts, and steps to one side. "Cover your ears," he tells his companions, then he flicks the switch.

The sound of the sonic emitter is too high to be picked up by human ears, but this close, they can feel it, vibrating through their chests like the bass at a nightclub, but stinging the ear-drums and throbbing through their heads like a migraine. Just as the pressure in his head becomes almost unbearable, Bruce strikes the frame, low and to the left, and the glass shatters, falling backwards into the room in a glorious cascade.

Bruce shuts off the emitter, and surveys his handiwork.

"They'll question why the window is broken," he says.

"As long as we get her safely away," Vengeance replies. "I didn't really think it would be feasible to keep anyone from finding out she's gone."

"Is that all you want?" Joker asks, skipping up to the window and peering out into the night. "That's eeeeeasy."

Bruce isn't sure he believes it, he can't see any way of accomplishing it, but the strange twisted way Joker looks at the world sometimes enables him to see things other people can't, so he gestures for him to go ahead.

Joker uses some Joker putty to melt some of the metal supports and carefully bends them out of the way, leaving a space just big enough for Bruce to squeeze through when Joker gestures for him to do so.

He looks to Joker for confirmation, and then drops, his cloak flapping open to slow his fall. He lands almost silently, and waits, looking back up at the window.

Joker stands silhouetted in the window, teeth gleaming in the moonlight as he grins. He makes a vague sort of gesture that Bruce is sure he's supposed to understand, and then Vengeance is there, leaping down almost too fast for Bruce to react, but he manages to catch her all the same, her weight driving the breathe from him, and then deposits her on the ground.

Joker comes down last, hanging by one hand while he bends the supports back, not, as Bruce had expected, to their original position, but bent inwards, the two ends just touching, as though some heavy weight had hit them. Bruce thinks he can see the beginnings of what Joker is planning.

Joker lets go, letting out a noise Bruce can only describe as 'weeeeeeeeeeeeee' as he falls, and lands lightly. Then he falls backwards, landing sitting with his legs straight out in front of him, and puts his socks and shoes back on.

It's so incongruous, Bruce has to push down a smile.

When he's properly shod, he springs to his feet and says, voice low and pitched so that it won't carry, "I need a batarang."

Bruce hands one over, intrigued. There's a knack to throwing them that generally took Robins several weeks to get, but Bruce knows BC has showed Joker where they’re kept, and lets him practise with one when Bruce is out.

Joker takes it, and then cups his hands around his mouth and makes an uncannily good owl noise. Tawny owl, to be precise, a female one. After a moment there's the answering T'woo, and a dark shape swoops above them, silhouetted briefly against the moon.

Joker takes careful aim, and throws, the bird dropping at his feet a moment later, batarang firmly imbedded in its chest.

Joker wipes the batarang off on the grass and passes it back to Bruce, and then he stands, the owl's body in his hand. He spends less time taking aim this time, just throws, but the owl sails neatly through one of the spaces where a pane of glass should be, and lands on the floor of the office high above with a faint thump.

"Good throw," Scandal says. "You are a man of many talents."

"Owl tossing used to be a popular sport in Arkham," Joker says with a shrug. "You should have seen penguins face every time we got one to land in his porridge."

Bruce wants to ask how, and why, but they don't have a whole lot of time, and it's unlikely that Joker's explanation will make any real sense. He contents himself instead with saying, “we need to get going.”

They make their way across the Island in fits and starts, running bent double for a few paces, and then ducking into cover when Joker gives the signal. He still knows the patrol rota pretty well, and no-one knows the Island like he does. Once, Bruce’s own knowledge might have rivalled Jokers, but it’s been a long time since he last had any dealings with Arkham, and excellent as his memory is, it doesn’t begin to rival Joker’s.

Relying on Joker like this is terrifying, but also strangely exhilarating, that same rush he gets when he leaps from a building, the terror of freefall tempered into excitement by the knowledge that he’s not going to hit the pavement below.

Joker’s obviously not enjoying being out in the open, for all his bravado. His fingers, always the one reliable guide to his mood, are twitching uncontrollably, a sure sign that he’s nervous, and Bruce wishes they were alone so that he could take Joker’s hands in his, hold them still until he calmed down.

Vengeance seems remarkably calm for someone relying on a super villain she barely knows, but then he supposes that anyone of her age is going to be fairly unflappable. He’s never been able to establish exactly how old she really is, but he knows she was in one of Stalin’s purges, that she spent time in a Siberian labour camp, and that the Spanish she uses when angry is at least a hundred years out of date.

The bag is heavy and awkward, and he’s having to keep his torso as still as he can as he moves so as to keep the machete from clinking against the now strangely heavy tennis balls. It’s only because of that, the awkward vertical way he’s holding himself, that he spots the guard. The man’s half concealed behind the feet on an unmanned watchtower, and it’s obvious Joker hasn’t seen him yet.

He acts on instinct, grabbing the maniac and pulling his tight against his body, flicking his cloak over him. It hadn’t been a planned move, he’d acted without thinking, driven only by his pathological need to keep Joker safe, but he realises as soon as it’s done that it was a good one. Scandal can make herself unseen if need be, and even if she were caught, she wouldn’t be imprisoned. Joker, for all his dexterity, is not a natural when it comes to stealth, and his garish clothes stand out in the darkness far more than her bare skin.

He glances back to check that Scandal has seen and understood, and is relieved to see that she’s melted into the shadows in that uncanny way of hers, only the slight gleam of the lamentation blades in the moonlight telling him she’s still there.

The guard has only come a few steps closer before stopping, and Bruce realises with horror that the man’s taking a cigarette break, leaning against the base of the guard tower to smoke.

Joker makes a faint grumbling noise and wriggles, obviously wanting free, but Bruce just tightens his arms around his captive in a constraining hug, and hopes Joker understands. Joker stills in his arms, then begins rearranging himself, slowly and carefully enough that Bruce knows it’s not an attempt to escape, only to get comfortable, so he allows it.

One of Joker’s gently probing hands finds one of the mesh inserts between the armour panels of Bruce’s suit and rests there, cool and oddly pleasant. Joker’s skin is colder than the air around it, but it doesn’t feel like dead flesh, the way cold skin sometimes can, rather it feels like Joker, inhuman but also filled with life.

Joker’s head twists to that it’s tucked beneath Bruce’s chin, wild hair tickling his nose, cheek resting against Bruce’s chest, feeling as small and delicate as a child in his arms.

Bruce can’t help but think of the morning Joker had explained his plan, the two of them lying curled together in Joker’s bed, close as lovers, no resentment or violence between them, and he wonders what it would be like if they could be like that all the time, if they could just rid themselves of all the baggage that makes their relationship so volatile.

He knows he wouldn’t really want that, knows the men in that scenario are total strangers to him, but it’s nice to imagine, for a few moments at least, a world where Joker has a name, and looks like a human being, and Bruce doesn’t have a scar on his side that aches in the cold.

He’s so absorbed in the feel of Joker’s hair on his skin, the coolness of his body, the way he smells of popcorn and hair dye, his own ridiculous fantasy, that he actually starts when he feels a gentle touch on his shoulder, and it’s only Scandal’s quiet voice saying his name that keeps him from punching her out of shock.

“We should keep moving,” she says, voice low. “Don’t know when the guard will be back.”

It’s harder than it should be for Bruce to untangle himself from Joker’s cool weight and stand up. He’d let himself get distracted, can feel that he’s going to have to fight to get his mind back on the mission.

Fortunately, it’s easy going for the next few minutes. No guards look their way, and there’s plenty of cover. Bruce focuses on the mission, and ignores the way Joker is tiptoeing and flattening himself against any buildings they pass, like a child playing at being a spy.

They stop a few metres from the main greenhouse, looking out over a neatly manicured lawn, no cover at all, and overlooked by two guard posts.

“Invisibility would be such a useful power,” Scandal comments quietly, coming to stand beside him. “Is there a way we can distract the guards?”

“No need,” Joker says. “If we go round, through the cemetery, then we can get in the back way.”

Bruce has never been superstitious, and if anything, he usually likes graveyards. They’re peaceful, and quiet, and very rarely the sight of any kind of serious crime. But the Asylum graveyard is creepy, the way Arkham’s office had been. Bruce remembers the stories of the spirit of Arkham, the ghost of Amadeus possessing inmates, driving them mad until they’ll do anything to get him out of their heads. He’d always dismissed the stories, and still does, but tonight he thinks he’s begun to truly understand where they came from. There’s something dark and rotten at the very core of the Island, centuries of madness and unhappiness infecting the place like a plague, making the whole place feel hostile.

The graves don’t help. Bruce tries not to notice, but it’s impossible for him not to see how many of them don’t have a name, or only one date. And beneath, over and over, the same quote, repeated hundreds of times on cheap sandstone headstones, the older ones unreadable with age, but Bruce knows what they’ll say. “The Wages of Sin are Death.”

“I used to think I’d end up here someday,” Joker comments, as the wend their way between the stones, moving bent double to try and hide their silhouettes. “No name, and just the one date, and The Wages of Sin are Death. Not the quote I’d have chosen, but it could be worse.”

Bruce clenches his fists at the idea, the thought of his Joker being buried here among this legion of identical stones, indifferently laid to rest by people who didn’t give a damn about him.

“You’d have gone out in a blaze of glory,” he says, as much to reassure himself as Joker. It’s not that he likes Joker, not that at all, it’s just that he doesn’t like the idea of anyone dying among people who don’t care. Even hatred would be better than that.

“Nice idea,” Joker says, “but who’d take me down? I could have taken myself out of course, but I’d never have got round to it. Too much to do, too much to think about, not enough time for dying. So I’d have got older, and slower, and I’d have spent more and more time in Arkham, until either I died during therapy, or I was old enough that IGA could bump me off without raising any suspicion.” He turns, his teeth gleaming in the moonlight as he grins. “I’m so glad we decided to become immortal instead. The Wages of Sin… Unoriginal. Horribly unoriginal. I’d have gone for something from Revelations, personally. Keep ‘em guessing.”

“And what name would be on the stone?” Scandal asks, her voice teasing. She doesn’t expect an answer, but she can’t resist the question.

“Joseph Kerr,” Joker says at once. “If they wouldn’t let me use my real name of course. And I bet they wouldn’t. Did you know, Spike Milligan wasn’t allowed to have ‘I told you I was ill’ on his gravestone? Disgraceful.”

“We’re nearly at the greenhouse,” Bruce says, just to change the subject. “How do we get in?”

“Window,” Joker says at once.

Bruce looks up, eyebrows raising when he sees the tiny half window high above them. “That window?”

Joker looks surprised. “Of course! It’s not so hard really. And I’m thinner than last time I tried it, so I probably won’t even need to dislocate anything!”

Bruce shakes his head. “There’s got to be a back door. A fire exit. Come on.”

They make their way around the side of the building carefully. The path is narrow, and the wind buffets them. Beside the path, the island drops away in a steep cliff, an almost sheer drop to the waters below. The sea had seemed calm earlier, but looking down on it now from so far above, it looks horribly rough.

They do find a fire exit, though not before both Scandal and Bruce have hauled Joker back from the cliff edge a ridiculous number of times. He swears he’s just looking, but the wind is picking up, gusting unpredictably, and a fall onto the rocks below would be certain death, even for Joker.

The door’s locked, but the lock is old and was never very secure to begin with. It’s the work of a moment to convince it that he’s just shown it an employee identity card, and the door swings inwards, the creaking of the rusting hinges barely audible beneath the sound of the sea.

Inside, the air his humid, full of the fresh green scent of growing things, and that peculiar sweet floral scent that Bruce will forever associate with Pamela Isely.

Officially, Poison Ivy had never been declared dead. Like Killer Croc, she’d just melted into the shadows of the city that had spawned her, become an urban legend, a story children told to scare themselves. Unofficially, the authorities all agreed that even with her unique physiognomy, she couldn’t still be alive. But her influence was still everywhere.

The plants that she’d touched, her babies, were… different. Special. There weren’t so many around now as there had been, not since the GCPD had organised a mass burning, but there were still parts of Robinson Park that no sane adult would walk in after dark, but which housed armies of homeless children, who insisted the trees grew fruit for them when they asked, and wrapped around them to keep them warm when they slept. There were still stories of construction projects having to be abandoned after the local greenery came to life and sabotaged the machines. There were the Arkham staff that tried to prune the plants in the Greenhouses and were never seen again.

The amount of time Ivy had been allowed to spend in the Arkham Greenhouses varied from stay to stay, depending on who was in charge of her care, but it was probably the one garden she spent the most time in during her life, and her power had seeped into the very soil, infecting even new plants. As the three of them walked into the greenhouse, there was a creaking of growing roots, and the huge blousy blooms of an out of season peony turned towards them, as though watching them.

“Are they dangerous?” Scandal asked, sounding the closest to nervous Bruce had ever heard her.

“Not so long as you leave them be,” Joker replies. “Don’t get those knives of yours out and we should be okay. You’re not vegetarian are you? Harley always reckoned they were more likely to attack vegetarians.”

“Knockout doesn’t understand the human desire to eat green things,” Scandal replies. “And neither of us can cook. Mostly we eat toasted cheese.”

“Well, let’s hope there’s no cheese plants in here. Or breadfruit.”

“Which way now,” Bruce interrupts, stopping at a fork in the path.

Joker screws up his eyes in concentrations, and recites, “left, left, straight, right, straight, left, left, right.”

“Is that the route from the front door, the window, or here?” Bruce asks, because the way Joker had said it, his tone sing song, it sounded like something he’d memorised, rather than something he’d just worked out.

Joker giggles, high and feminine. “Doesn’t matter. All the paths will take us where we want to go eventually. But I’m going left left straight right straight left left right. So there.” And he strides away before Bruce can stop him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone who leaves a comment will get a personal visit from the Joker. You wont see him, since you'll be asleep, but he'll definitely come. Make sure you've got plenty of candy in stock.


	9. Stage Four (part 2)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a lot of plants mentioned in this chapter, and I think it adds to the ambience if you know what they look like so you can imagine the rooms. Since I know several of my readers are reading this in their second language, there's a brief guide to the plants of the Harriet Arkham Memorial Greenhouses. (Wherever possible, I've tried to include pictures of the specific breed I was imagining.
> 
> [Algae](http://algaetrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/18.jpg), [vines](http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2Foreons%2F8303585958%2F&h=0&w=0&tbnid=1TzOiCvbDek8hM&zoom=1&tbnh=183&tbnw=275&docid=bzFVI3eBxuuKeM&tbm=isch&ei=MR0LVNycB5DsaNGvgfAB&ved=0CAgQsCUoAg), [creepers](http://i01.i.aliimg.com/wsphoto/v0/920608151/80pcs-pack-Japan-Creeper-font-b-Plant-b-font-font-b-Ivy-b-font-seeds-for.jpg), [moss](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=algae&biw=1366&bih=643&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=DhwLVIGzHMeXat29gpAK&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ#tbm=isch&q=moss&facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=BFjeBS0WCcL_iM%253A%3BrL6cGcB_EPbhLM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fmountainmoss.com%252Fblog%252Fwp-content%252Fuploads%252F2010%252F10%252FGREEN-carpet-of-MOSS.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fmountainmoss.com%252Flearn-more%252Fwhy-moss-2%252F%3B2816%3B2112), [lotus](https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTXNMH3-Bt4NdSIxrZVRYr8Ec5KjeZImc58YWazYSzZHHZj2zgD), pondweed, [tree ferns](http://www.cepolina.com/photo/nature/plants/fern/dicksonia-squarrosa/5/fern-New-Zealand-tree-wheki.jpg), [orchids](http://www.photoswinprizes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/White-Orchids.jpg), [Venus flytraps](http://www.easycarnivores.co.uk/shop/images/D/IMG_7473.jpg), [pitcher plant](http://cdn-1.carnivorous--plants.com/images/pitcher-plant.jpg), [living stones](http://images.plant-care.com/lithops-flower.jpg), [cacti](http://biocircuits.ucsd.edu/outreach/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/14612922-cacti-plants-1000x667.jpg), [palm tree](http://www.worldofstock.com/slides/TEP1440.jpg)

Joker’s calmer now they’re inside, moving with what Bruce can only describe as a swagger, hands shoved deep in his pockets.

Bruce is feeling calmer too. They’re still following Joker’s plan, still relying on him, but now they’re in the Greenhouses, unchanged for the last hundred years thanks to the Gotham Historical Society, he at least has an idea of where they’re going.

He hasn’t been in the Greenhouses for more than sixty years, but even the planting looks the same as he remembers. That, he suspects from the way the plants all move to face them as they pass, is thanks to Ivy. He’s found that her babies have a tendency to cannibalise any other plants they meet.

The greenhouses are dark, the paths lit only by the scant starlight shining through the algae covered glass, giving everything a faint green glow. It feels as abandoned as the graveyard, or Arkham’s office, but not in the same way. Those were man-made places, made purposeless by the lack of humanity in them. The greenhouse hasn’t so much been abandoned as allowed to return to nature, and the emptiness of it feels more like that of an ancient forest than a ruined building. Bruce supposed that it would probably be considered just as creepy by most people, but it doesn’t have the oppressive atmosphere he’d found so uncomfortable. He’s on edge here, the way he always is when out of his natural urban environment, but the building doesn’t feel hostile, only disinterested.

He thinks that will change when Joker gets out the weed killer.

They stop for a moment in the atrium, a large circular space with what were once ornate wrought iron balconies around the walls, and are now a great mass of vines and creepers. The high domed ceiling is clearer than the lower ones elsewhere, less covered with algae and moss, and the starlight shines in bright enough for him to make out some of the details of the room without needing his night-vision.

Bruce had visited the greenhouses as a child with his mother. He remembers only snatches of the day now, the softness of her gloves, the scent of orange blossom, but he remembers this pond, beautiful then with pale pink lotus flowers just opening, their huge leaves looking like boats to his small eyes. They’d sat on the edge of it and watched the koi carp, trying to spot the one black one his mother had insisted was there. They hadn’t found it, and later one of the gardeners had told them it had died.

The lotus plants are dead now too, smothered by their less delicate cousins, the water of the pond hidden beneath thick green pondweed. Bruce is gland his mother’s not here to see it. She would have hated it.

Joker leads them on, along dark tree hung paths slick with rotting leaves. Insects scuttle in the darkness, the quiet sounds almost hidden by creaking noise of plants growing and moving unnaturally fast.

In the sub-tropical house, the tree ferns maintain a dignified silence, but the orchids watch them, flowers turning to face them and even reaching out their air-roots to brush against their arms as the pass, like grasping hands.

“Not far now,” Joker says, dodging agilely to avoid the touch of a delicate white orchid with elegantly arching stems. “It’s going to get harder from here though, so watch out. I don’t know how many of the carnivorous plants will have survived.”

Bruce doesn’t see any Venus flytraps, (delicate things, he’d had one as a child and had been heartbroken when it only lived a few months) but it’s hard to notice anything in the next room except for the enormous pitcher plant.

In the jungle, he remembers, they can grow big enough to trap and eat mice and rats. This one is big enough to eat a man. The huge central stem resembles a tree fern, with vivid green tendrils as thick as Bruce’s arm extending from it, leading to the towering pitchers themselves, which are the same acidic green as Joker’s favourite shirt, and covered in a network of fine red veins. Its lips are a deep blood red, plush and obscene looking.

“What does it eat? Something this size, it cannot be living on insects,” Scandal asks, staring up at the towering plant.

“Patients. Or anyone that crossed the Arkhams. That was always the rumour, anyway,” Joker says with a shrug. “The pitchers dissolve a body faster than an acid bath, and there’s no incriminating evidence left behind. And overcrowding and underfunding has always been a problem at the dear old Alma Mater. So, so the story goes, all those patients that couldn’t pay and wouldn’t be missed, Jeremiah used to have them fed to this monster.”

“I can believe it,” Scandal says. “I met the man once, when Ragdoll had been locked up here. They say he had been a good man in his youth, but he’d already started to grow megalomaniacal when I met him. But what I meant was, what do they eat now?”

Bruce had allowed himself to get distracted, had been so focussed on the enormous pitchers that he’d taken his eyes off the roots and stems, doesn’t notice that they’ve been edging towards them until a touch to his leg makes him leap back instinctively. The roots are covering the ground, tendrils winding across the doorway to the next room, blocking their exit. “I think,” he says, riffling through his belt for anything that might be effective against a semi-sentient plant, “that now they eat anyone stupid enough to wander into the Greenhouses.”

Joker laughs, high and manic like he hardly ever does anymore, and snatches the bag from Bruce’s back.

He drops into a crouch, shoving one hand into the bag without looking what he’s doing, rummaging around until he finds what he’s looking for. “Vengeance,” he says, and tosses her the spray bottle of weed killer. He arms himself with the machete, and two of the tennis balls, both clutched in the same hand, long fingers twisting awkwardly to hold them both.

“We can’t kill it,” Joker says, “it’s the only member of its species in the world. We just need to distract it enough to get through that door without being eaten. Vengeance, you try and clear space for us to get through, Batsy and I will keep Audrey here occupied.”

Bruce has armed himself with explosive gel, and pressed the tiny button on his hip which makes long serrated blades spring up along the backs of his arms. He’s not sure either will be much use, the plant stems are too thick for most of them to be severed with his arm blades, but he’s got nothing else in his arsenal that might work against man-eating plants. When Joker explained his plan, he’d failed to mention this bit.

The roots are moving faster now, covering the floor so thickly that it’s impossible not to stand on them, and undulating so that it’s like trying to stand on the deck of a small boat in a storm. (Actually, it’s nothing like that, it’s like standing on the roots of an autonomous semi-sentient plant that’s trying to kill them, but Bruce has never been good with metaphors.) Smaller tendrils keep trying to wrap around their ankles, meaning they have to keep moving, jumping from root to root.

Scandal heads for the door, back flipping neatly over a thick stem which makes a swipe for her, the lamentation blades sliding free as she lands. The blades slices through the plant stems like they’re water, but it moves fast, new ones twisting up to take the places of the ones she destroys, the doorway hidden behind a thick curtain of stems. The stems do recoil from the weed-killer when she sprays them, but only for a few seconds, new ones replacing them almost instantly.

Joker tosses one of the tennis balls into the air and catches it again, quite the feat with his hands full standing on a constantly moving surface, and then lobs it over arm, straight into the nearest pitcher.

There’s a moment’s silence, and then a muffled boom. The pitcher is lit from within by red fire as whatever the ball had been filled with ignites, and then the whole thing explodes, splattering Bruce and the Joker with torn pieces of leaves and half digested animals. Something Bruce is sure is a human femur hits his shoulder. Joker laughs uproariously at the look of disgust on Bruce’s face, leaning on his knees to support himself as he laughs, batting away the tendrils that try to catch him with his machete.

“You made the tennis balls into bombs,” Bruce says, halfway between annoyance and resignation. He’d expected this, there’s only so many things Joker could have wanted fertiliser for (and that had been hell to find. Gothamites had never been big gardeners, even before the population boom of the 2030s resulted in most of the cities’ gardens and parks being bulldozed to make room for housing developments) but he’d hoped it might have gone in the putty. “You promised me you wouldn’t make bombs!”

“And you believed me?” Joker looks incredulous. “But I lie, Batsy baby. That’s what I do. I’m a liar.”

“I’m aware of that,” Bruce retorts, slashing at a groping tendril with his arm blades, “but I’d hoped you’d at least realise that a stealth mission is no time for explosives!”

“Darling, it is always time for explosives!”

“Stop bickering!” Scandal calls. “The grenades are working, I’m making progress.” There’s a clear area near the bottom of the door, weed killer and Scandal’s blades keeping the tendrils from reclaiming it.

Joker makes an infuriating ‘told you’ face, and tosses Bruce the tennis ball he’s still holding, scooping two more out of the bag.

“Squeeze them to activate,” he says. “Once activated, you’ve got about 15 seconds to throw them before they take your arm off.”

“And you’ve been carrying them round in that bag?” Bruce asks, horrified. Joker has always been careless of his own safety, but this is a new low. In Joker’s defence, they still weren’t sure just how immortal Joker really was, but the answer was probably very. Whatever he’d done to cheat death had also made him able to heal from terrible wounds astonishingly quickly. If anything though, that just made it worse, because it meant that if there had been an accident, there was no guarantee Joker would have been killed. It was possible he’d have been alive but incapacitated, completely helpless when IGA found him.

“You have no faith in me Batsy. I might be mad, but I’m not stupid. Pressure points. You’ve got to squeeze them just right to mix the chemicals. You might have to use both hands, your fingers aren’t as long as mine. They’ll go crunch when they’re activated. Like a glow stick. Do you remember glow sticks? The 90s were a good decade.”

“I had my back broken. I thought I’d be paralysed for life.” Bruce bent to slice a tendril that was worming its way up his crotch, like something from the horrifying animated porn Joker liked to watch just to annoy him.

“Well, yeah,” Joker says, kicking at a root which is trying to ensnare his ankles and slashing at it with the machete. “But the hair was hilarious. You take the other big pitcher, I’ll deal with the roots.”

“Nightwing’s hair was pretty terrible,” Bruce admits, trying to stretch his fingers to emulate Joker’s grip, and squeezing until he hears the crunch of broken glass.

There’s something viscerally satisfying about blowing things up, and Bruce can’t help the smile that quirks his lips when the second pitcher explodes outwards in a crescendo of torn petals and nectar.

Joker’s two balls land neatly among the twisted rootstock, and he and Bruce are already moving before the explosion comes, ducking through the low space Scandal has cleared in the foliage. Scandal comes last, diving through and using the weed killer to repel the roots that reach through the gap after them.

She’s covered in foliage, stems she’d cut off at the base when they caught her but not had time to remove. Bruce helps her, being as careful as he knows how to be not to cut her as he chops them off her. Joker watches, silent and worryingly solemn, not making any of the lewd jokes Bruce expected. He still doesn’t know why it is Joker dislikes Scandal, but he knows his antipathy has the potential to endanger them all.

The room they’re in houses desert plants, a great glass case of living stones, and rows of cacti. It’s quiet, and peaceful, and Bruce lets out a great sigh of relief. None of the plants are moving, the air still and undisturbed, and Bruce has never been happier to see cacti in his life.

“What now?” Scandal asks, handing Joker back the machete. “Where do we go now?”

“This way.” Joker tucks the machete back into the bag before Bruce can object, and heads off through the rows of tables, leading them on through the room.

There’s a grill set into the floor near the centre of the room, apparently long forgotten, since Scandal and Bruce have to move a potted palm tree to make it accessible. Joker wrenches it up, muscles in his arms and shoulders straining beneath his jacket. 

“Anyone who forgot their swim suit will have to do this in their underwear,” Joker tells them with a grin, and disappears down into the darkness of the tunnel.

Bruce heaves out a sigh of annoyed fondness, and gestures for Scandal to precede him into the dark of the pipe.


	10. Stage Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this isn't the best chapter. Sorry about that. But like Joker said, now this is out of the way, the real fun can start!
> 
> (And I think we'll be getting our first POV switch in the next chapter or two)
> 
> TRIGGER WARNINGS: mentions of sexual abuse (nothing graphic) and some jokes about the same. Sorry about that, Joker isn't a very nice person sometimes. (Always.)

_They’ll be keeping someone as powerful as Sopporo in high security meta, and I’ll bet you… er… your finger unbroken, that that’s top floor of D Block. In which case, we can break into the security control room for that floor pretty easily, and not have to worry about being watched while we actually do the child-snatching bit of this mission of yours._

 

Despite Joker’s dig about swim-suits, the pipe is mostly empty, just a couple of inches of bitterly cold water at the bottom and dripping from above. It’s bigger than the air vents or the dumbwaiter had been, but Bruce is still forced to go down onto all fours and crawl. The water finds all the thin mesh inserts that connect the heavier armored panels of the Batsuit, raising goose bumps on his arms and making him shiver.

Joker is loping along ahead of him, his long legs bent, his weight resting on his hands. He looks like some kind of vividly colored ape, and unsettlingly inhuman. Bruce is just glad that Joker's in front of him, he can imagine the comments he'd be making if he were behind Bruce right now.

"Always pipes," Scandal laments behind him. "Or sewers. Why can I never rescue someone via a rooftop?"

Bruce chuckles. "This makes an interesting change for me," he says.

"Perhaps I should add wings to my costume," Scandal suggests. "I bet Hawkgirl never had to crawl through water pipes."

"Well how do you think I feel?" Joker's voice echoes oddly in the pipe. "I've got my best suit on. You're only wearing... whatever you call that black leather monstrosity."

"Mostly," Scandal says with a grin in her voice, "I call it wipe clean and machine washable."

Bruce can't see Joker's expression, but he can picture it, and he joins in Scandal's soft laughter. It feels so good to have someone else know about the Joker. Red and the Wolf have know for a few years of course, but it's a sore subject, and certainly not one he could joke about (no pun intended). He and Dick used to spend their downtime in the cave making fun of the cities super villains. (Actually, Dick would do the making fun, Bruce would just listen and smile). He realizes he's missed that, missed the camaraderie of other heroes. He hadn't truly realized just how much he'd cut himself off, what a recluse he'd become, and he makes himself a promise that once Sopporro is safe, he's going to try and make an effort to rejoin the community. There's been rumors that Lois's kid wants to reform the Justice League. Maybe it's time.

Ahead, Joker slows, hands coming up to trace the ceiling of the pipe, apparently looking for something.

"Climbing time," Joker says, in the singsong voice he knows drives Bruce up the wall.

The vertical pipe is far narrower, narrow enough that he actually worries he'll get stuck more than once as he wriggles his way up it. Joker of course scrambles up it like a monkey , apparently without effort. Bruce finds his only option is to wedge himself into the pipe as far as he can, and then writhe desperately higher, hoping he doesn't kick Scandal in the face as he does.

After far too long, long enough that Bruce starts to feel claustrophobic and vows to spend the next couple of patrols focusing on street crime, out in the open, the pipe lets out into a dark box, presumably some kind of tank, fortunately empty. Bruce wonders whether Joker had timed their climb for this, or if he'd been planning to swim it.

Bruce manages not to yell in surprise when Joker starts to climb him, but it's a near thing. He succeeds in holding still though, even when Joker uses the groin plate of the Batsuit as a step.

Seated on Bruce's shoulders, strong thighs gripping Bruce's neck in a way that's a lot less terrifying that he knows it should be, Joker is able to reach the access hatch on the top of the tank and slide it open, hauling himself up and out.

Bruce lifts Scandal up, her skin icy cold beneath his gloves, and holds her while she gets a good grip on the edge ad lifts herself out. He leaps, catches the edge with the very tips of his fingers and slowly hauls himself up, his shoulders protesting at the strain.

"What now?" Scandal's voice is soft, and she's got her body tucked behind the tank.

"Oh don't worry," Joker says, his teeth shining in the light of Bruce's torch,."No cameras in here. the guards have got to have somewhere they can go for a quiet cigarette without being disturbed. And somewhere they can take the prettier inmates of course."

Bruce winces, and turns his head away. It's not the first time Joker's hinted that the abuse rampant in the asylum is more than just physical violence and neglect, but when Bruce tries to press for more details, he only gets deflection and tasteless jokes, so he's never been certain how true those veiled hints really are.

"Ragdoll complained bitterly about the lack of sexual abuse he was subject to when he was in here," Scandal comments, her light tone incongruous in the heavy atmosphere. "I believe he felt it was a criticism of his appearance."

"He never said so, but I know that used to bother Harv as well. He pretended he didn't care, but I knew. It's very sad to be a find upstanding super villain with no admirers."

"And I suppose you had lots," Bruce comments acerbically. The idea of Joker having admirers of that kind sickens him, even if it's just another of Joker's inventions, and he hates himself because he can't tell if it's jealousy or disgust at the abusers.

"Oh one or two, one or two. Not so many as Harley of course, but then she had such an... obvious kind of attractiveness. I like to think I'm more of a connoisseur piece myself. But we're not here to discuss the hearts I've broken with my dashing good looks. I believe we were on a mission?"

"So tell us what the next step is," Bruce demands, irritated at Joker's non-answer.

"Now, my dearest darling, you get to show off a little. Outside that door is a corridor with one camera. Officially that corridor is rarely monitored, since there's no inmates on this level, but everyone knows the feed from that camera is the best source of gossip on the Island. That corridor is our biggest discovery risk."

"The signal jammer..." Bruce begins, but Joker shakes his head, hair fluffing up like an angry bird.

"They never bothered updating the cameras down here, not unless they actually break. It's still wired. All I need you to do is turn it off without being seen. I estimate once we do, we've got probably 20 minutes to work with before someone gets suspicious and comes looking. It doesn't matter if they know people have been in this building, my plan accounts for that, so messy is fine as long as it's quick."

Bruce pulls out a batarang and heads for the door, pausing before he opens it to look back at Joker.

"You're sure about this?" This moment could make or break the entire escape and Joker's solution is risky as hell and relies on information which can't possibly be up to date.

"I don't want to get caught," Joker says, as serious as Bruce has ever seen him. "I can't guarantee this will work, but I'm prepared to take a gamble that my knowledge of IGA is good enough. Trust me?"

Bruce finds his mouth is inexplicably dry as he nods, even though this whole venture has been one long exercise in trusting the Joker. This is the first time he’s admitted it more than tacitly. He trusts the Joker the watch his back, the way he used to trust his boys. It’s a sobering thought.  
There’s no way to prepare, he doesn’t know where the camera will be, so he just opens the door. The camera is a few feet down a fairly short corridor, within easy throwing distance, but he can see at once that that won’t help, the wire is encase in a thick plastic covering. Easily broken up close, but a batarang would bounce harmlessly off it.

He judges the distances, the cameras rotation, his own supply of tools, and then he’s moving, fast as he can, throwing one of his round discs of adherent explosive straight for the camera, hitting it square over the lens, blocking it’s vision. Then a sprint up the corridor (thrown from this distance, the glue isn’t nearly strong enough to hold the explosive in place for more than a few seconds, but a few seconds is all he needs) and he can rip the wires away from the wall, cutting power to the camera.

“Not as dramatic as I’d hoped,” Joker says. He’s leaning against the doorjamb, hip cocked, a faint smile on his face. “No black flips, or spinning kicks or anything. Not even a batarang. I’m frankly disappointed.”

“We’re here to do a job. Showing off can happen when we’re not in the middle of a break in.”

Joker grinned. “I’m going to hold you to that, big boy.”

“Less flirting, more rescuing,” Scandal retorts, but she’s smiling like she thinks they’re cute. Bruce finds it faintly disturbing. “Where now?”

“Onwards and upwards,” Joker replies. “Turn the signal jammer on Brucie, there’s a good chap.”

Bruce does, and Joker leads them through the door at the end of the corridor (locked, but the door are flimsy enough that Joker just kicks the lock off) and into a stairwell.

“Unless our luck is really bad, no one will notice the cameras blacking out in here,” Joker comments. “You haven’t broken any mirrors recently, have you? Or strangled any black cats? Or cat themed villains? No? Well then this should be a cakewalk. Can we get cake after all this Batsy? I want cake.”

“You can have all the cake you want if you’ll just shut up and start walking,” Bruce tells him. He learnt long ago that threatening Joker is pointless, but bribes often work. He’s like an unusually large murderous toddler, and always ready to be distracted by the promise of fun or sweets.

“Yay cake,” Joker says, and starts up the stairs, his long legs enabling him to take them three at a time, leaving Bruce and Scandal to try and keep up.

The stairwell seems endless, and though every couple of flights they pass doors, Joker ignores them, heading higher and higher. Bruce is embarrassed to find his thigh muscles are starting to ache after they pass the fourth door. He’s incredibly fit, but he usually just grapples up any flight of stairs to save time.

Joker’s voice floats down from above them. “Come on boys and girls, not far now. Nearly there!” It might be meant as genuine encouragement, but like everything Joker says in that strange singsong voice of his, it comes out sounding mocking and derisory.

Bruce doesn’t stop and lean on the banister to catch his breath when he finally reaches the landing where Joker is waiting, but he’s honest enough to admit that he probably would have, had he been alone.

“Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Joker asks, with a mocking grin. “Only sixteen flights!”

“Shut up,” Scandal growls, and Bruce is relieved to see a sheen of sweat on her olive skin. It’s nice to know he’s not the only one who found that hard work. “Where now?”

“Anyone else need the toilet?” Joker asks, apparently apropos of nothing, and then he’s opening the door and is through it fast enough that Bruce and Scandal have to struggle to keep up.

They follow him, into a brightly lit corridor, a CCTV camera just beginning to turn in their direction, and then through a door on their right, and into a bathroom.

“Grab a stall, feet up, jammer off,” Joker says, disappearing into the furthest stall, water pistol unstrapped from his back and in his hands.

They obey, and Bruce counts to three in his head after he hears and then turns off the signal jammer.

“No sound detection in here,” Joker says, his voice echoing slightly in the tiled room. “But there’s cameras in the mirrors. The less we use the jammer, the longer before they figure out what’s going on.”

There’s a moment of quiet, only the sound of the water pistol, and then Joker says, “Jammer on, this way.”

Bruce is first out, ducking into the stall Joker had been occupying and finding quite a large chunk of the wall missing, revealing a narrow space beyond, half filled with pipes. Joker is already in the space, edging his way along, precariously balanced on the copper heating pipes, using the cooler plastic of the water pipes above his head as handholds.

“Will they take my weight?” Bruce asks, looking down at the pipes. It seems unlikely. Joker weights probably half what Bruce does, and Scandal even less. They might be okay, but Bruce isn’t a small guy, and he’s solid muscle.

“Maybe not,” Joker agrees. “You’ll think of something though.”

Sighing with irritation at this lack of planning on Joker’s part, and already wincing at how uncomfortable he knows this part is going to be, he gestures Scandal into the narrow space ahead of him, and then tries to find a way to wedge himself into the space without breaking anything.

It’s far too narrow to brace with feet and back, the way they had in the walls of the main building, but it’s not so narrow that he sticks, like the pipe. Eventually he manages to find handholds, spaces in the masonry just big enough to get a grip on, and twist his feet enough that he can brace them against the wall. It hurts, his fingers, his ankles and his back, and his height means he keep hitting his head on the pipes, scraping his skull hard enough on some nail or rivet at one point that he worries it will have torn the cowl, but he knows how to ignore the pain, how to push it away and keep going for what seems like forever.

He’s moving slowly compared to the others, and he doesn’t even have to pause when Joker stops to make an escape route. They are through long before he even reaches the hole Joker’s made, and he hears the sounds of combat, and grits his teeth against the worry and irritation. They can handle each other, and if need be, Scandal can handle Joker, but he doesn’t entirely trust either of them not to kill anyone.

He’s relieved, when he finally makes it through the hole and finds himself in what must be the CCTV control room for this floor, maybe the whole building, to find the two guard are unconscious rather than dead. He checks both pulses, just to be sure, and ignores the hurt look Joker gives him.

When he’s sure they’re both going to be okay, he straightens and really takes in the room. It’s fairly large, and almost completely dark, back walls and floor lit only by the flickering lights of the banks of screens that line three of the walls, each showing a different cell, or room.

Bruce sees plenty of faces he knows, a lot of whom he put here (not deliberately, he tells himself that once the police have someone, what happens after is out of his hands, unless it’s illegal. Tonight has convinced him that that’s an attitude he needs to change.) There’s a few members of the Church of the Butterfly, the current Scarecrow, Raptor. A good chunk of the current cream of Gotham’s underworld.

“You can turn the signal Jammer off if you want to,” Joker says. He’s commandeered on the chairs, and is watching of the banks of monitors intently. “No cameras in here. Old Arkham took them out, after the time the police commandeered some footage and Arkham had to edit out some of the less savoury bits. Apparently some people really like watching Super villains. IGA never put any back in. ‘S supposed to be a show of trust, or something.”

“The more I learn about this place, the more I wonder why it wasn’t burnt to the ground decades ago,” Scandal says, without taking her eyes off the monitors. She jabs a finger at one. “There she is. Cell 497.”

“Excellent!” Joker claps his hands together in anticipation. “Now the real fun can start!”


	11. Interlude: Stage Six point one

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the bit of the plan Joker _didn't_ tell Batsy about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for some torture gore and some ableist language from Joker.

Joker hadn’t known, not really, how the rescue was going to go. Not the details. The things he’d told Batsy, they’d come to him as he’d spoken, whatever tricksy bit of his subconscious did the planning giving him just enough details to sound like he knew what he was doing. But now he’s looking at the screens, it’s all slotting into place.

He’s sitting in one of the cells. Not a perfect likeness, obviously someone who’s only ever seen him in pictures, (the hair’s too short, slicked back like he hasn’t worn it for years, and skin is a shade too dark) but there he is, stretched out on a bunk, in the unfamiliar blue of the new IGA Arkham uniforms. He’s never had the chance to see himself from this angle before. He looks good. And he’s the one last puzzle piece he needed, and now he can see the whole picture, knows exactly how this caper is going to go down.

He probably ought to tell Batsy where he’s going, but he’ll only be a minute or two (he doesn’t know for sure, but he think he probably doesn’t want Batsy along for this bit anyway, thinks it’s probably best if Batsy doesn’t see this). Batsy will probably never even notice he’s gone. (That’s not true, Batsy always notices, which gives Joker a warm fuzzy feeling inside, but he won’t be long and he thinks Scandal can probably be relied on to keep Batsy from doing anything _too_  stupid.)

He’d expected the Asylum to have changed, at least a bit, but inside the high security wing it’s as though no time has passed, the colour of the patient’s jumpsuits the only difference. Joker finds himself skipping, kicking up his heels and grinning to himself, tossing the signal jammer he’d swiped from Batsy’s belt into the air and catching it one handed. He doesn’t like being away from Batsy for long, starts to get this cold empty feeling inside, like the water of Gotham bay rushing into his lungs, but it’s kinda fun to have a mission, a goal. It’s been too long, so many years and years and years just sitting in the cave with only BC for company, unable to make himself break out in case Batsy never came to find him. This is different. It’s like… like when parents take their kiddies out shopping and then leave them to their own devices, but only for a few hours, and only on certain streets. Enough freedom to be exciting, but with the reassurance of knowing his Batsy is close by if he wants him. A way of easing himself back into the world, maybe. He’s seen the way Bruce has been smiling tonight. Knows it’s only a matter of time before he starts playing with other superheroes again, rejoining the club, and Joker wants to be ready for that. Maybe it’s time for both of them to rejoin the world?

He hasn’t been watching where he’s going, relying on his feet to guide him, and now they stop, apparently satisfied that they’ve got him where he needs to be. He looks round, not seeing the cell he’d been expecting, but grinning when he realises what’s going to happen next.

“I could call the guards you know,” a bored voice says from the nearest cell, and Joker rocks back on his heels and grins his widest brightest smile at the speaker.

“I could cut your face off and wear it as a shockingly avant garde hat,” he says. “You’ll notice I am refraining.”

Scarecrow (not funny old Jonathan, dead now, dead dead dead, but the new baby Scarecrow, the one with the irritatingly beautiful eyes, the eyes Joker wants to pop right out of their sockets because he just knows Scarecrow’s been using to look at his Bat) sits up, resting his elbows on his crossed legs, and smiling a strange little half smile. “Not if you want your precious rodent to keep indulging you, you can’t. I watch you two, you know, nearly all the time. Much better than any soap opera, if a little more pathetic. It’s really time you moved on.”

“What, so you can have my Bat all to yourself?” Joker demands. He’s remembering now why he hates this not-Jonathan. “Think if I’m gone he’ll take you home with him instead?”

Scarecrow stands up, comes right up to the Perspex and presses his hands against it, staring at Joker with those unblinking azure eyes. “Unlike you, Mr Kerr, I do not require the attentions of a rodent themed vigilante in order to justify my existence. Quite frankly, the less I see of _your Bat_ , the better, so far as I’m concerned.”

It had been subtle, a threat and a boast delivered so casually that a lesser man (that is, anyone other than Joker and his Bat) might not have noticed it, but Joker’s attention immediately zeroed in on those two words, obvious references to his conversation with Scandal in the graveyard.

“How did you hear that?” he demanded, far more curious than angry. Obviously Scarecrow hadn’t ratted them out to IGA, so the fact that he had been watching them wasn’t a particular problem, simply a puzzle. “There weren’t any cameras anywhere near there.”

“I know everything. Omniscience is a terrible burden,” Scarecrow replies, shaking his head sadly.

“I never did understand why you chose Jonathan’s identity rather than Eddie’s,” Joker tells him, sticking his hands in his pockets and striking a nonchalant pose. “You’ve really got much more of a Riddler temperament.”

“The name Riddler has never been one to conjure with. No one quakes at the memory of Edward Nygma. And I do so _like_  being feared. I’ve always been a great admirer of yours, you know. Of course, I’ve far surpassed you now, but in my early days I studied your criminal history in some detail. The complete lack of any obvious motive is so terrifying to stupid people. You become the unknown, and the unknown is always feared.”

Joker grins, pleased they’re getting off on the right foot. “That makes everything so much easier. If you’re familiar with my work, you know I’m not joking (pun very much intended) when I say, I can and will kill you if you don’t help me. I may kill you anyway, a fact which you are no doubt aware of, but cooperation at least gives you a chance of actual survival.”

Scarecrow pulls a face, like he’s bored of the whole conversation, and moves back to sit on the bed, long legs crossed. “You’ve gone soft. What do you want?”

“Well, I went to a lot of trouble getting ready, and while I admit the effect might have been slightly spoiled by carnivorous plants and a whole lot of wriggling through pipes, it really seems a shame not to share this beauty with the world. So I thought maybe you could help with that. Just something small to begin with, like, say, replacing all the security camera feeds with an image of my face.”

“And if I don’t feel like framing the Church of Joker for whatever hell you’re here to raise?”

Joker grins. Scarecrow’s cell is impressively low tech, bolts and padlocks rather than electronic keypads, a necessary part of trying to contain a technopath a powerful as him, and while it seems to be keeping Scarecrow contained, Joker could break in in less than three minutes. On the other hand, Scarecrow is proud and not the type to react well the threats. Bribery, though…

The signal jammer is small, but not quite small enough to fit through the air holes punched into the Perspex. Not in one piece. And down here, he’s no way of checking whether Scarecrow is actually doing what he says he is. Joker hates deals that require actual trust, they almost always go wrong.

He holds up the signal jammer, turning it around and around in his fingers so Scarecrow can see it. “You do it, and I won’t need this little bit of tech anymore. And I’m sure you could do all sorts of interesting things with all these wires and microchips and things.”

Scarecrow moves shockingly fast, pressing his hands against the Perspex and staring longingly at the little bit of tech in Joker’s hand. “No-one’s escaped from here for more than five years,” he breathes. “No one gets out of Arkham.”

“If you agree to help me, it’ll be two escapes in a month. Just imagine how angry that’ll make them. Walsh will probably get fired.”

“And you won’t kill me the moment I’m free?”

“Oh, my dance card’s full up right now. Not that I’m saying I won’t kill you, nothing in this life is certain least of all promises made by lunatics. But I won’t kill you right away. Not for years, maybe. And really, you’re not going to get a better offer than that today!”

Scarecrow smiles, a slow unblinking smile, and says, “Do you want a delay, or is everything ready to go?”

Joker’s smile widens, until he feels like the top of his head is going to pop right off. It's always such fun when a plan starts to come together. “Just let me go catch my secret weapon. I’ll give you the go signal on the way back through.”

Scarecrow blinks, those vivid eyes disappearing for a lovely second and then coming back, reminding Joker all over again how much he wants to pop them like soap bubbles, and nods. “Sounds fair.”

Scarecrow is in cell 4116, and he’d seen himself on camera 51, which means three security doors at least before he finds his secret weapon, but that’s okay, because there’s a guard station nice and close, just one man all on his own, and Joker won’t even show up on the cameras. Wouldn’t want Batsy to see what happens next. He’s got such a delicate stomach, poor dear.

It’s a source of constant amusement and delight to Joker that even now, after nearly a hundred years together, the Big Bad Bat still constantly underestimates him. It’s like he still can’t quite believe that anyone, even _Joker_ , can be as twisted and amoral as he surely knows he is. It’s fascinating, and sort of adorable. So it apparently hadn’t occurred to Bruce that when Joker left a stash of supplies for himself, there’d be more to it than just an out of date laptop. It’s not much, just one of those little sewing kits you sometimes get free in hotel rooms, but he’s done far worse with far less, and he can’t help chuckling to himself in gleeful anticipation of what’s to come. It’s been so _long_!

The guard is eating a mars bar and reading the paper, not even bothering to watch for danger. It’s really pathetic how easy it is to walk up behind him, get an arm round his neck and drag him down to the floor.

He gets the man flat on his back, Joker straddling his broad chest, knees pinning down his arms, and gets to work. Normally he’d knock someone out for this, if he couldn’t tie them up, just to keep them from struggling too much, but there’s no time now, every second counts, so he just uses his weight to keep the man in place, and gets the man’s own taser into his mouth, holding it against his tongue to keep the man from speaking.

“Ssh, ssh, don’t scream. If you scream, I’ll kill you, and I don’t want to kill you. I like this suit. But I will, if you scream, so ssh. Who knows, keep quiet and you might actually live through this!”

The guard makes a desperate whining noise, but he stops trying to scream, lies still like a deer in the headlights, as though if he keeps still enough, Joker might forget he’s there. He’d forgotten just how damn funny normal people are, like retarded children trying to pretend to be grown-ups.

The scissors that come with the kit are tiny, so small it’s a struggle to get even his elegantly slender fingers through the holes, and he doesn’t have enough hands or time to make a neat job of this, but a rush job is better than nothing, so he holds the guard’s hair with one hand, keeping his head as still as he can, shifts his weight to make sure the man beneath him knows that the slightest movement will result in a broken wrist, and begins snipping.

The scissors are tiny, but they’re sharp, and eyelids are so frail and delicate that it’s surprisingly easy to cut through. He scratches the man’s eyeball, the idiot will not stay still, but he doesn’t need the man to be able to see. He just needs him to look the part.

It’s impossible to make a neat job of it, blood making it hard to see what he’s doing, and the delicate skin catching and tearing, making the man scream around his mouthful of taser, but Joker finds he rather likes the scruffy home-made effect it creates, the eyeball standing out all the more when the skin around it hangs in blood tatters.

The man keeps trying to close his eyes, the muscles in his brow clenching, but there’s nothing to close, just ragged flaps of skin, and it’s the funniest thing Joker’s seen in _years_.

“I know it’s hard to keep still,” he tells the guard, as kindly as he can through the uncontrollable manic laughter that keeps bubbling up out of him like the blood bubbles around the man’s eye, “But do your best. You cooperate and you’ll need some major plastic surgery, but you’ll be okay in the end. Keep wriggling like that and I’m going to end up accidentally blinding you.”

He can feel the man’s muscles quivering with the urge to move, but to his credit he manages to keep pretty still while Joker does the second eye, much neater than the first but close enough to a matched pair not to matter.

The man does start to move again, thrashing and screaming and gagging on the taser when Joker gets out the needle and thread. This bit is easier though, no real precision required (apart from threading the needle which is made nearly impossible when the man he’s sitting on his bucking like a bronco).He manages it though, gets the needle threaded and stabs it through the tense muscles of the man’s cheek on his third try, begins looping the thread through the man’s cheek and round the corner of his mouth, pulling it tighter and tighter, tugging the man’s mouth into first a sneer and then when he starts on the other side, a happy smile.

The man tries to fight, gets one of Joker’s fingers in his teeth and bites till he bleeds. Joker almost doesn’t manage to punch the man in the throat for that, he’s laughing so hard. He’d told the man the truth when he said all he’d need if he cooperated was plastic surgery. God knows what kind of treatment he’ll need now he’s had a mouthful of Joker’s blood, every bit as toxic as the chemical sludge that made him.

Joker doesn’t stop working, the pain barely registering, just hits the man till he lets go and goes right back to his sewing, still laughing so hard his hands shake with it at the hilarity of the whole thing. God it feels _good_ to be back in the game.

The finished effect isn’t anything like as good as Joker toxin, the man's eyes obscured with blood and his smile crooked, but that would give the game away, let everyone know he’s still alive, and when he comes back he wants it to be with a real bang, something he controls not some worthless guard he killed while helping out a Batsy-touching bitch like Vengeance.

It takes a couple of tries to get the man to his feet, he’s not unconscious but he seems to have checked out, his mind gone somewhere else to escape the pain. Joker wonders if he’ll end up as a patient in here himself. That would be satisfying.

The man keeps touching his face, and Joker has to find a handkerchief to clean all the blood off the idiots fingers and eyeballs before the retinal and fingerprint scanners will recognise the man, but he’s had plenty of practise dealing with people in shock, knows how to take charge, steer the man where he wants him to go safe in the knowledge that he’s not with it enough to even think of trying to get away.

Their journey takes them through corridors full of cells, and Joker keeps his head down, glad it’s after lights out. The inmates yell and catcall, pounding on the doors of their cells and screaming obscenities, but none of them seem to recognise him, all their attention focussed on the thrill of seeing one of their captors brought so low.

It’s not himself in the cell when he gets to it, but a slight dark skinned woman he thinks he recognises from TV. The jumpsuit is too big on her, just as it had been noticeably too short on his own long limbs.

“Counterfeit,” he says, keeping himself in shadow but making sure she can see the ruin of the guard’s face. It’s fun, being so melodramatic, which must be why Batsy likes it so much. “I have come for you.”

Her gasp of shocked awe when he steps forward, lets the low lighting in the corridor illuminate his grin, is hugely gratifying, as is the way she loses control of her shape, reverts to what he thinks must be her natural form. (It’s singularly bland and uninteresting, a woman you wouldn’t look twice at in the street, and he sees why she spends all her time as other people).

“You’re, you’re him. You’re the Prophet. You’re _real_!”

“Well of course I’m real kid. You didn’t really believe I was dead did you? No, I’ve just been taking some handicraft evening classes. Look, here’s one I made earlier!” He shakes the guard, grinning when the man groans, low and desperate. Counterfeit giggles, more nervousness than amusement. She’s much too young to have understood that joke, but that’s okay. He doesn’t need her to laugh, he needs her to do as she’s told.

“I’m here with a job for you, if you want it. I’ve got a mission, and you’re the only one who can help me. You game?”

“You’re breaking me out?” She sounds like she can’t believe what’s happening, like she thinks maybe this is all a dream.

“Not quite. Not yet. I’m breaking someone else out, and I need you to cover for her, just for a few months.”

“And then?” She’s shifted back into him, a mirror image staring back at him with a wide-eyed hopeful expression he knows he’s never worn.

“Then you get to go free. Go back out into the big bad world and raise some hell in my name. You in?”

“Of course, how could I… You’re the Prophet. The bringer of sacred chaos. How could I refuse?”

“That’s my girl,” he tells her. “Let’s get this door open.”

They don’t even need retinal scans to get the cell door open, just a simple swipe of a keycard, and Joker almost laughs at the incredible stupidity of that. IGA are getting complacent, and when this gets out, when the inmates realise Arkham’s impregnability is just a story, IGA are going to have a whole lot more breakouts and riots on their hands. Just thinking about the chaos tonight’s work will cause is enough to make him tingly all over.

He steps aside and gives Counterfeit a little bow as she steps out of her cell, her expression as filled with wonder as any child as Christmas. She reminds him suddenly, painfully of Harley. That same awed unquestioning trust. But no, this kid is scared and broken, totally reliant on other people to shape her. Harley was all that, but she was more too. Harley had a bit of spunk, not like this wet blanket of a supervillain.

He shoves the guard into the cell, sealing the door behind him, and take a moment just to enjoy the warm nostalgia of the moment. Then he takes Counterfeit’s hand, smiles at her and her and says, “Shall we?”


	12. Stage Six

_Once we're in the building, it shouldn't be any trouble to let Sopporro out, not with your and Vengeance's computer skills. And once we've got her, we walk out, back the way we came. Simple._

 

When Bruce first notices Joker is missing, he allows himself the luxury of a minute of pure blind panic. Then he tells Scandal that they’ve lost their guide.

“He left about four minutes ago,” she says distractedly, not taking her eyes off the screens. “I assumed you knew.”

“You let him go? If he’s caught…”

“He’s a big boy, he can look after himself,” she tells him, sounding amused rather than concerned. “He seems to be having a chat with Scarecrow at the moment. I don’t remember that being in the plan, but he’s probably improvising.”

“He’s on the cameras?” Bruce demanded, pushing Scandal out of the way to see a screen of static. Automatically his hand dropped to his belt, only to find the signal jammer missing from its pouch. “Oh god.” Bruce wasn’t usually one for blaspheming, but it seemed the only appropriate reaction to the situation. “He hates Scarecrow. If he kills him…”

“You should have a little faith,” Scandal says, shoving him gently away so she could see the screen as well. “He might be mad, this clown of yours, but he’s not stupid. He wants this mission to go well, just as much as you or I do. He will not sabotage it.”

“He might not mean to,” Bruce said glumly. He is fully aware of how intelligent Joker is, but he’s also all too aware of the man’s impulsiveness and short attention span. He might not mean to get them caught, but if Scarecrow annoys him too much, Bruce doesn’t doubt he’ll lash out. “Nothing we can do to stop him now. I don’t have a spare jammer.”

On screen, the camera feed suddenly returns, showing Scarecrow still apparently alive and well, sitting cross-legged on his bed and grinning up at the security camera. The static feedback created by the jammer had moved on, blocking out feed from a corridor, and then another.

“He knows we are here,” Scandal said, jamming her finger at the screen showing Scarecrow.

“There aren’t any cameras here,” Bruce says. “But it’s possible he recognised my design in the signal jammer. He’s encountered my tech before, and Joker was close enough for long enough for him to get a good read on it.”

“I do not understand why he is still here,” Scandal comments, ignoring the static, which has stopped outside one of the rows of cells. Bruce remembers there being a guard stations there on the schematics. “Surely he could have walked out any time he wanted.”

It takes Bruce a moment to realise she’s talking about Scarecrow rather than Joker, most of his attention taken up by worrying what the madman is up too. He’s never been merciful, but his treatment of Arkham guards tends to be especially brutal.

“His cell is low tech, padlocks and deadbolts,” Bruce says distractedly, eyes not leaving the grainy static that marks Joker’s position. “And there’s no one else in this block clever enough to understand the limited messages he might be able to send them. He could, possibly, open every other cell, but that doesn’t guarantee anyone will let him out, and it would certainly make IGA upgrade their defences. But being in here really doesn’t put much of a cramp in his criminal activities. There’s enough tech on the Island that he can always find a signal to piggyback on, however secure they try and make their servers. Last time IGA tried to cut food costs, downgrading the qualitity of the rations fed to the inmates, he killed six people in protest, without even getting out of bed. He has no real reason to leave. If anything it just cements his reputation, that he can still spread so much panic while imprisoned.”

“I did not know him well,” Scandal comments, “But I think on the whole that I preferred the old Scarecrow. It’s so hard to fight technopaths.”

Bruce can’t help cracking a small smile, even though Joker still hasn’t moved, which almost definitely means he’s doing something horrific. “Jonathan was a coward too. It made him very easy to bring in. He’d give up at the first sign of violence. This one is much more dangerous.”

Joker’s static is finally moving, heading into the cell block proper.

“Before your companion returns, there is something I wish to discuss with you,” Scandal says, unexpectly, and Bruce actually tears his eyes away from the camera feeds to look at her. “You know of Martha Lane? Superman’s daughter?”

Bruce nods. He’s only met the kid once, when she wasn’t much more than a toddler, but Red and the Wolf know her, the way junior superheroes always seem to know one another. Red’s opinion on her is a little scathing, but even she agrees that the girl is mastering her abilities quickly, and that her desire to do good is every bit as genuine as that of her parents.

“She approached me,” Scandals says. “About a month ago. She wants to try reforming the Justice League.”

“I’d heard rumours,” Bruce says, carefully. “She hasn’t spoken to me herself, not yet.”

“That’s because she’s terrified of you,” Scandal says with a smile. “I said I’d have a word with you.”

“Who else has she asked?”

“I believe she’s intending to ask those young protégés of yours, and the Creeper, while they’re all busy fighting Martians tonight. Flash has already agreed. Knockout and I are reserving judgement. She did suggest Sopporro, but I quickly put an end to that idea. I swore to protect the girl, and letting her become a superhero is definitely not the way to do that. But I did suggest Raven might be interested, if she can locate her.”

“She doesn’t spend much time in this dimension anymore,” Bruce said. “Has anyone spoken to Xanadu? She’ll know where to find her.”

“Truthfully, I avoid the woman,” Scandal says with a shrug. “She is disconcerting. But I will suggested that Martha speak to her. She should be able to suggest some other possible recruits.”

“Creeper won’t join,” Bruce said, trying to keep his eyes from sliding back to the screen. “He’s really not the superheroing type. And I doubt Red and the Wolf will. They dislike working with others.”

“And you?”

“I… don’t know. Perhaps. I’ve been locked away in Gotham for too long. But after what happened last time…”

“With Artemis and the Badga Migdal still ruling Themiscera, I doubt we’ll have any Amazon trouble. Unless they try and invade, of course. But before it all fell apart, the JLA did save the world. Even I acknowledge that, and I was a supervillain back then. You were a load of self important do-gooders, but you saved the world most weeks. We’ve been lucky since. Noone’s yet risen to take control of Apokalis, and since Superman left, aliens seem a lot less interested in this planet. But it can’t last. The cult of Mal’e’candra are growing bolder, and I’ve heard rumours that Boom boxes are activating for the first time in nearly seventy years.”

“I’ll think about it. Maybe speak to Miss Lane. And I promise I’ll do my best not to be too terrifying.”

Scandal smiles. “I’m not sure even your best attempts at geniality would convince the younger heroes that you are not a sort of living nightmare. Speaking of which, you own personal nightmare is on the move again.”

Joker’s moving faster now, cameras cutting out one after another as Joker heads back towards Scarecrow’s cell, and then suddenly every camera feed goes black, just for a moment, and then Joker’s face, or at least Joker’s face as drawn by someone who doesn’t know him, fills every screen, laughing silently like something from a horror film.

“Shit,” Bruce says, hands twitching with the need to do something but totally helpless, trapped in this room and reliant on Joker’s whims. “The idiots’ going to get us caught.”

“No,” Scandal says, smiling. “Did you not notice which cell it was he visited? I think I see his plan now, and I think it’s going to work. The Church will happily take the fall for everything we do here, and explain away any sightings of him.”

Bruce has to concede that. He’s just furious Joker hadn’t warned him in advance about this stage of the plan. And he doesn’t like to imagine what Joker might have promised Scarecrow to recruit him. The maniac causes more than enough damage from within his cell. The last thing they need is for him to get free.

Before he can really start to panic though, he hears footsteps in the corridor outside, Joker’s distinctive bouncing tread and another set he doesn’t recognise. Then the door swings inwards to reveal… a dead woman.

There’s a moment of pure shock, his mind filling with ideas of Lazarus pits and black magic, and then his brain catches up, and he begins to spot the flaws in the illusion. This woman is a little shorter than the real Harley Quinn, curvier. Her smile lacks that manic edge, and her ears are a matched pair, where Harley had lost a chunk from one of hers in some fight or other. This isn’t Harley Quinn, but it’s a damn good copy, and suddenly Bruce understands exactly what they’re doing, what Joker’s play is.

“Ms Durling. Nice to see you again.”

She recoils from him, the way members of the Church of Joker always do, and Joker catches her arm, dragging her forcefully into the room and pushing the door shut behind him. Bruce wonders if it’s the fact that she’s wearing Harley’s skin that makes him be so rough with her, or if she’s just getting on his nerves. Sorry as he feels for the woman, Bruce has never liked Counterfeit, or respected her.

“The Devil. You didn’t say the Devil would be here!” she hisses, clutching Joker’s arm in terror. “Don’t let him take me sir, please!”

“Don’t be a silly girl,” Joker says, patting her hand vaguely. “Batsy’s not going to take you anywhere. And you shouldn’t be so scared of him. There can be no chaos without order, you know. He’s my other half, the yin to my yang, the Sonny to my Cher, the… chalk to my cheese. Can’t have one without the other, see?”

Counterfeit doesn't look convinced, and Joker must see it, because he frowns, the expression just as comically exaggerated as all his other expressions and says, "it's like this, kiddo. Either you help me and the Dork Knight, thereby also aiding in the spreading of sacred Chaos, or you refuse, and I kill you. It really is as simple as that."

Bruce remains silent, the restraining hand Scandal puts on his arm unnecessary. He won't let Joker hurt the girl, but she doesn't need to know that.

"Sorry, holiness," Counterfeit says, her voice shaking but resolute. "I panicked. It won't happen again."

Joker pats her hand again. "That's my girl." He smiles at Bruce, his signature grin, but with a hint of real pleasure in his eyes. "Ready, Batsy?"

"Lead the way," Bruce says, recognizing that this will all go much more smoothly if he lets Joker take charge, at least nominally.

A little way from the main cell block, are the highest security cells, the ones where they keep the psychics, anyone with a meta ability that might help them escape, like mind control or teleportation. Joker had been in one of these, his astonishing talent for escape overriding his lack of superpowers.

They have to pass through three sets of security doors to reach Sopporro's solitary cell. Counterfeit gets them through, much to Joker's delight, by morphing into Jonas Walsh.

The cells in the secure row are eerie, spaced far apart in an attempt to keep the inmates from talking. The front walls of the cells are made of the same bullet proof perspex and the regular cells, but with the air holes much smaller and higher up, giving a disconcerting impression of aquarium tanks. The insides of the cells are mostly bare concrete, a few padded for either protection or soundproofing.

Walking there is strangely nostalgic, so many of the names from his youth have been passed on, new faces given old names. There was the new Hatter, a powerful hypnotist who owed her powers to STAR labs mutagen project. The new Firefly was another of STAR's accidental creations. The current Dollmaker he particularly loathed since she had taken inspiration from Professor Pyg, using living humans as the basis of her horrific creations.

Sopporro is in the furthest cell on the row, well away from the others. The walls are unpadded, but unusually, she has her air pumped in, rather than air holes in the glass. Either she's a higher escape risk than even Joker had been, or they really don't want her talking to the guards.

The cell requires thumbprint recognition and a staff pass to get in. Counterfeit transforms into someone Bruce recognizes as Vivian Cheung, head of psychology at the Asylum, and Joker produces a swipe card from his waistcoat pocket. It has bloody fingerprints on it.

Sopporro smiles brightly at them when the door to her cell slides open, pleased but not apparently surprised.

Vengeance goes to her at once, pulling her into a tight hug. "Are you okay, Minnie? Did they hurt you?"

"I'm okay Auntie Scandal, I knew you'd come for me. They tried to hurt me, and scare me, so I showed them all their childhood nightmares and they put me in here. It's very boring." She smiles seraphically round at them all. "One of them had nightmares about you, Mr Clown. I think you killed his mommy. Are we going now?"


	13. In which Daring Escapes are made

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bruce plays dress-up and Joker finds himself unaccountably distracted

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long to actually post, hopefully the last chapter won't take so long to write.
> 
> Notes on Sopporro: when I created her I never intended for her to be this powerful. I just needed someone who Batsy would want to rescue. I'd planned her connection to Scandal from the beginning but I had no idea I was creating a demi-god. But now I've got her, I'm definitely going to use her, so look out for appearances in upcoming fics in this series.
> 
> Enjoy!

They leave Counterfeit locked in Sopporro’s cell. The women are close enough in height that Counterfeit’s jumpsuit still fits reasonably well when she’s wearing the other woman’s form. Bruce hadn’t liked leaving her there, but he can’t think of another way to get Sopporro out unnoticed, and at least Counterfeit will stay locked up. It worries him too that Joker knows about the Church of the Butterfly. He’d known keeping the knowledge from the Clown forever wasn’t practical, but all the same the idea of Joker knowing about his fanatical followers sends a shiver of dread down Bruce’s spine. He trusts BC to do its best to keep Joker from contacting them, but the man has a way of finding bypassing even the most sophisticated jailers, and even though the Batcave security now is the highest it’s ever been, Bruce knows his prisoner well enough to know it’s mostly the man’s dependence on Bruce himself that keeps him from escaping. If he knows he’s got friends on the outside, not just friends but worshippers, it’s probably only a matter of time until his next escape. Bruce is beginning to regret ever agreeing to help Scandal. Whatever Sopporro means to her, rescuing her surely can’t be worth the trouble it’s ultimately going to cause.

 

He can at least see why Scandal was worried enough to mount this rescue. Sopporro turns out to be sweet, talkative and almost childishly innocent and naïve, exactly the type who’d be eaten alive in here.

 

She’s even taken a shine to the Joker, apparently totally unafraid. She addresses him as ‘Mr Clown’, and seems far more interested in him than in Scandal.

 

She and the Joker are walking ahead of Bruce and Scandal now, arms linked, and Sopporro is actually laughing at Joker’s attempts at humour. Joker for his part seems delighted at having an admirer, and is doing his best impression of a gentleman, holding open doors and paying her compliments.

 

If Arkham weren’t quite such a hell hole, Bruce would suggest leaving her there. She obviously needs some kind of psychiatric treatment.

 

“Don’t fret,” Scandal says, in a tone full of surpressed laughter. She pats him on the arm. “Minnie’s not going to steal your clown.”

 

Bruce ignores the joke. After more than a hundred years, he’s got used to ignoring digs and his and Joker’s relationship. “Aren’t you worried about her? I thought you were supposed to be protecting her!”

 

Scandal laughs. “She can look after herself. And to be honest, I expected this.”

 

“You expected that the vulnerable young woman you’re trying to protect would make friends with the Joker,and you still let himcome?” Up until now, Bruce has always thought of Scandal as admirably sensible. But perhaps there’s more of her father in her than he realised.

 

“She’s the Dream-Eater, and he’s a nightmare creature. She’d be just as bad with Scarecrow. Joker is, or has become, a primal fear in this city. He’s a nightmare archetype now, and that means he’s… one of hers.”

 

Bruce had done all the research he could on Sopporro before the mission, but there’s precious little information on her available, even to someone with an assistance like the Batcomputer.

 

“Vengeance, who is she?”

 

“You knew her granddad, you know. Not much of a family resemblance, so I’m not surprised you didn’t spot it. She doesn’t take much after the Lawton side of the family.”

 

Understanding clicks into place. “She’s Deadshot’s granddaughter?”

 

Floyd Lawton, aka Deadshot. One of the most skilled sharpshooters the world had ever seen. A teammate of Scandal’s, back in her Secret Six days. They’d been close, formed a pseudo sibling relationship. Floyd had called her Sis.

 

“I promised Floyd I’d keep an eye on his family for him. Course that was easier before his daughter got herself knocked up by Morpheus himself. God knows how she managed to seduce one of the Endless, but she disappeared from my surveillance for a night and nine months later that little ball of trouble was born.” She sounds resigned rather than annoyed. “She’s more or less invincible, which is useful, but also pretty much insane and only about 50% real, which makes looking out for her difficult. She could probably have walked out of this place the day they caught her, but the girl doesn’t have the sense she was born with. No self-preservation instinct.”

 

Bruce stares at the young woman, long dark hair trailing over the back of her Arkham issue blue jump-suit, leaning close to Joker and laughing at something he’s said. She doesn’t look especially powerful.

 

“So why exactly did we need to rescue her?”

 

Scandal laughs bitterly. “She’s the living embodiment of nightmares. Can you imagine what would happen if we’d left her much longer among super-powered mental patients. And that’s just assuming she doesn’t get bored. Her father literally has the power to define reality, and some of that power passed to her. Only her realm of control is Night-terrors. I’ve never seen her really angry, but when she threw tantrums as a toddler, people died.”

 

“So why didn’t you tell me? Why bring me into this mission without all the intel?”

 

Scandal shrugs. “Honestly? I didn’t think you’d help. She’s mad, and dangerous, and everything you don’t like. I assumed you’d call off the whole plan if you realised who she is.”

 

He honestly might of. She sounds like a recipe for the kind of chaos he’s spent his life trying to fight. “You get her away from Gotham,” he warns. “When we get out, you get her as far away from my city as you can, understand?”

 

“That’s the plan,” Scandal says agreeably. “I’ve got a house lined up for her in this sickeningly cute town in Iowa. The sort of place where the neighbours greet new arrivals with plates of cookies. It won’t stay sweet for long with her there, but it’ll give her a chance to recuperate, and me time to find somewhere better.”

 

“And she will… cooperate, with our rescue?” He knew little of the Endless beyond their names and descriptions, but one thing he did know was that they tended to be both unpredictable and unreliable, at least by human standards. The last thing he wanted was for all this hard work to be wasted.

 

“So long as nothing scares her too badly, she’ll be fine,” Scandal says. “She gets bored easily, and even an assylum’s worth of nightmares won’t have been enough to keep her entertained.”

 

Bruce nodded his understanding. He was unsure of what this last stage of Joker’s plan would entail. When he’d described it (warm skin and Joker’s breath teasing against his ear making it hard to focus) Joker had said simply that they’d go back out the way they came in, but wouldn’t be an option. Scarecrow’s hijacking of the cameras would have been noticed by now, and getting back into Amadeus’ office would be unnecessarily difficult.

 

The journey back through D Block had been relatively easy. Eventually it would be noticed that the guards in the security control room weren’t responding, and no doubt opening the cell had sent some sort of electronic warning out (that’s how Bruce would have designed the system, and IGA could afford to be paranoid) but they met only one guard on their way back down to the basement, and Sopporro had put him to sleep with a word, before the rest of them could even react. The woman had crumpled to the floor, already snoring, and curled up, clutching her electric baton like a teddy bear.

 

The journey back through the pipe had been equally uneventful, and Joker had even behaved himself, not making a single lewd joke for the entire journey.

 

The man eating pitcher plant had also been put to sleep with a word, and Bruce had taken the opportunity to read its label on the way past. Nepenthes Islia Gigantica, only know member of its genus, created by Poison Ivy. The botanist who had named it had also been one of its victims. Bruce wondered idly about the fate of the person who’d been paid to put in the sign.

 

Now they were strolling through the paths of the greenhouses, and Joker and Sopporro’s pleasant conversation, coupled with the thick jungle scent of greenery and the dappled moonlight was making Bruce relax more than he though wise. The place still had that ancient feel to it, but now, half the mission complete and Joker behaving himself, it feels friendlier than it had before,more like the place he’d visited with his mother.

 

Joker halts in the main room, the one with the pond. Sopporro continues for a few steps, her face turned upwards and a smile lifting the corners of her mouth as she surveys the room. After a few moments, Bruce begins to hear sound from the trees, something more than the ever present creaking of plants growing and moving. A rustling of something large moving among the leaves, something that could be a low growl.

 

Scandal slaps Sopporro’s arm lightly. “None of that my girl. This isn’t a jungle and the poor fools who work here have enough to be afraid of without you adding snakes and leopards and the like.”

 

“But they’d be so happy here,” Sopporro says, sounding genuinely surprised at the chastisement. “This is nearly such a lovely place. It just needs something really dangerous lurking in the shadows and it would be perfect.”

 

“There’s plenty of dangerous things in here already,” Scandal says. “Now behave.”

 

Sopporro hangs her head. “Sorry Auntie Scandal.”

 

“That’s okay. Now what’s out next move, Joker?”

 

Joker grins. “Weeeeell, this is the bit where it gets really fun.” Bruce doesn’t groan and put his head in his hands, but it’s a near thing. Things Joker thinks are fun are invariably fatal to someone. “See, the mooks in the control booth? They have to check in every twenty minutes. Precaution against them falling asleep. Plus, the guards chatter all the time, and someone’s going to notice the two we put out of commission.”

 

“Two Joker? Sopporro only knocked out one. What did you do?”

 

“He’ll live Batsy, no need to worry. They should even find him in time to save his sight, since as I was saying, they’re going to notice pretty quickly that he’s not at his post. Everyone out there is going to be on high alert. We’re going to need a distraction if this charming young lady,” a slight bow in Sopporro’s direction “is going to get off the Island unharmed. Fortunately, I am an extremely distracting person and during out pleasant little stroll along the water pipe, I came up with a really delicious idea.” He reaches into his inside pocket, and pulls out two items. A powder compact and a tube of lipstick. “It’s makeover time!”

 

 

 

To Bruce’s surprise Joker doesn’t insist on doing his makeup for him, apparently content to sit on the other side of the pond and watch him intently, red eyes glittering in the half light as he explains the next step of the plan to Scandal and Sopporro.

 

“You’ll need to get back down into the caves,” he’s telling them. “Me and Batsy will create a distraction, while you two head for the main manor. About thirty feet south of the window we climbed out of, hidden under a rhododendron, is a manhole. They’re all locked these days, but the code to open that one should be 2247. They never change them, but in case they have, you can take the last of the Joker putty.

 

“Once you’re in the caves, head left along the tunnel for about five minutes, it’ll open up into Croc’s main cave. There’s unicorn stickers to follow from there on. Me and Batsy will meet you back by the boat, okay?”

 

Scandal nods confidently, and Sopporro smiles her vague little smile, but Joker still hasn’t taken his eyes off Bruce.

 

Bruce is using a combination of the compact’s tiny mirror and his own reflection in the water to get the look right. The powder is too light to be able to get a really good covering, but he at least looks paler, especially from a distance, and it makes the slick of lipstick stand out even more vividly. The black paint he wears around his eyes under the mask adds a skull like component to the look, pleasingly ghoulish.

 

“What do you think?” he asks when he’s done. Scandal chuckles at the sight of him and Joker surprises him by remaining silent, just licking his lips and still staring with something more than his usual intensity. He looks like a wild animal eying up its prey, and Bruce has to suppress a shiver.

 

“Your outfit is all wrong,” Sopporro says, consideringly. “Do you have more of those suits back home?”

 

“Plenty, why?” Bruce asks, though he already knows the reason. She doesn’t answer, just waves a hand vaguely in his direction.

 

The feeling of his suit changing itself into a facsimile of Joker’s is fairly horrifying, the fabric crawling against his skin like a living creature, but after a moment it’s done and he’s wearing normal, or at least not living, clothes.

 

The outfit she’s given him isn’t an exact replica of Joker’s, simpler, more casual, a tee rather than a shirt, and a simple blazer rather than Joker’s tail coat. It’s comfy, allowing pretty good freedom of movement. It won’t offer any protection in a fight, but it at least won’t impede him too much.

 

“Thanks,” he says.

 

“It was easy,” she says with a shrug. “Evil Batman is a lot of people’s nightmare. So’s good Batman, but not in the same way. You look nice though. Bright colours.” She giggles softly. “Mr and Mrs Clown.”

 

Joker makes a sort of groaning noise, like he’s in pain. “Did you have to say that? I’m trying to work here!”

 

She just grins, unrepentant, and Scandal smiles too, apparently both in on the joke. Knowing Joker, it’s probably all to the good that Bruce doesn’t get it.

 

“Shall we go?” Bruce asks, in a desperate attempt to get them all back on track. It’s hardly the first time he’s had to worn a ridiculous costume as part of a case, but he still wants it over with as soon as possible.

 

“I… yeah, sure,” Joker says, shaking himself out of whatever daze he’d been inhabiting and tearing his eyes away from Bruce. “We’ll rendezvous in the caves. Any trouble… improvise. I can’t be expected to do all the planning around here!”

 

Scandal smiles. “We’ll see you down there,” she says, and then she pulls Sopporro back out of the way to let Bruce and Joker pass.

 

No one notices them for an amazingly long time, despite them using the Greenhouse front door, which probably no one has for decades. Bruce is actually a little embarrassed on IGA’s behalf.

 

“Remember,” he says to Joker, one last warning before the fighting starts, “No killing.”

 

Joker throws him a lazy salute. “Sure thing boss.”

 

Bruce doesn’t believe for a second that he’s sincere, but there’s nothing he can do because they’ve been spotted, a searchlight focussing on them and someone shouting, demanding they get down on the ground. Ahead they can see people hurrying towards them, guns raised, and the red dots of sniper sights hover like mosquitoes in the air around both of them.

 

Joker cracks his knuckles. “Party time.” Then to Bruce’s amazement, he drops to his knees, hands behind his head, the picture of surrender. Since Joker has never truly surrendered in his life, Bruce knows straight away that this is a ploy, an attempt to lure the guards into punching range, so he follows suit.

 

Joker actually waits till one of them has him by the wrist, preparing to handcuff him, before he strikes.

 

His free hand shoots out snake fast, catching the man on the nose with a sickening crunch of cartilage. Bruce takes that as his signal, lifting up into a crouch and flooring two guards with a sweep of the leg.

 

The fighting is intense but familiar, and Bruce finds to his surprise that he and Joker work well together. They’ve known each other so long, fought so many times, that they know one another’s moves perfectly, know the other’s weak spots and automatically compensate for them. Bruce takes a flying leap into a guy about to hit Joker from behind, since the clown never watches his back, and Joker throws a guard’s baton to take out a guy who would have been at just the wrong angle for Bruce to hit without straining his left shoulder, weaker than his right ever since he took a bullet there.

 

The guards all have guns, but Bruce and Joker keep things fast and chaotic enough that they don’t dare fire them, and in close quarters a gun become just an awkward lump of metal, not even heavy enough to be useful as a club these days. (Joker had commented once, while watching some ridiculous action movie from decades ago, that modern alloys made pistol whipping anyone an impossibility. He’d sounded disappointed).

 

It’s hard to judge time in a fight, adrenaline making everything seem both faster and slower than it is, but Bruce’s arms are starting to ache, and the scarred skin of his knuckles has split in a couple of places from punching body armour, when Joker catches his eye from across the whirling melee of arms that surrounds him. (Realising they can’t shoot him, the guards have started trying to just hold Joker still enough to be able to shock him into submission, something Bruce knows from long experience to be impossible. When he wants to be, Joker’s like an eel). Bruce doesn’t know what it’s a signal for, only that it’s a signal, but he knows Joker well enough not to be surprised when the shot rings out, shockingly loud in the night air.

 

Bruce takes the opportunity to snatch a gun of his own out of one of the guard’s holsters. He won’t use it, no amount of time will break that particular rule, but it won’t hurt to have one, a show force in support of Joker.

 

“Well, ladies and gentlemen,” Joker says, pointing the gun at the nearest guard and grinning what Bruce thinks of as his public grin, the one he hasn’t seen for more than twenty years, the one that makes his heart beat a little faster with remembered fear, “it’s been fun. But by now my Sister should be far away, so it’s time for us to go.” He bows theatrically, though the gun never wavers. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what will happen if you try and follow us?”

 

He begins to back away and Bruce mimicks him, keeping close. The guards make to follow but a sharp gesture of Joker’s gun soon has them falling back.

 

Joker’s free hand catches the back of Bruce’s Jacket, then slides under the fabric to catch hold of his belt loops, and guides him backward, both of them somehow managing not to stumble. Joker’s fingers are cool against the small of Bruce’s back, and unaccountably reassuring. Using a gun, seeing Joker smile like that for the first time in so long, realising just what he’s unleashed onto his unprepared city, it’s all been terrifyingly stressful. His heart is racing, but it quiets a little at Joker’s gentle touch, that small reminder that whatever else, he knows Joker and Joker knows him.

 

Joker guides him back until his feet hit a sudden rise. Before he can look, Joker mutters, “manhole, keep watch.”

 

Bruce keeps his eyes on the darkness, watching the movements of the distant guards, while behind him he hears the electronic noises of Joker keying in the release code and then lifting the manhole cover.

 

“Come on Batsy, daring escape time.”

 

Bruce drops the gun, breathing a sigh of relief at having it out of his hand.

 

Joker is already disappearing down the hole, and Bruce follows, his fingers finding the ladder in the dark, imbedded into the wall of the shaft. Taking a deep breath, he follows his clown down into the darkness.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comment, or Sopporro will get into your dreams!


	14. In which our heroes win the day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my gods you guys, this is it! I can't believe this fic is actually over! I really hope you enjoy this last installment (and don't hate me too much for it).

Bruce pulls the hatch closed behind him, and descends the ladder in total darkness. It won’t prove much of a deterrent if the guards are determined to follow them, but it should slow them down a little, since he doubts they have the necessary codes memorised the way Joker did.

The ladder stops abruptly, and even after a century of leaps of faith, letting go and dropping down into the blackness makes his heart race.

He lands in water, only a few inches below the last rung of the ladder. Somewhere nearby he hears Joker, his feet splashing in the shallow stream. Bruce blinks three times in quick succession, activating his night-vision, the sudden flood of green light startling after the total darkness.

Joker’s pale skin shows bright against the dark backdrop, his long lean figure silhouetted in emerald. He looks pensive, even worried, and Bruce steps forward, puts an hand on Joker’s arm.

Joker turns to look at him over his shoulder, and his thoughtful gaze turns unmistakably lustful, even though he surely can’t see anything at all. His pupils are blown wide, trying to find even a sliver of light, and he licks his lips, a quick unconscious movement that Bruce can’t help focussing on.

“Fuck you looked good up there, Brucey,” he murmurs, turning so that he’s actually facing Bruce, their bodies close enough that Bruce can feel the heat of Joker’s skin, feel his breath on his face.

“Really?” Bruce asks dryly, because he’s reached the point where the whole evening’s been so surreal and stressful that nothing seems surprising anymore. “That’s what does it for you? Clown make-up?”

“You have a distressing tendency to be far too literal about everything,” Joker tells him with a twisted sort of half smile. His eyes are focussed on Bruce, unblinking and disconcertingly intense for someone who should be blind. “That’s not any clown make-up. Did you know clowns have to register their faces? No two clowns can have the same design. And right now, you’re wearing mine.”

Bruce realises with a sudden twist of the stomach that Joker’s right. He’s wearing Joker’s marks, clear as day, a sign of possession as unmistakable as Joker’s scar. It’s a surprisingly heady thought, and the fact that Joker is just as aroused by it as he is, even headier. He grins at Joker, his best impersonation of that wide wild grin, even though he knows Joker won’t be able to see it.

He’s underestimated his nemesis though. Long slender fingers come up, trace the lines of Bruce’s smile, and Joker groans like he’s been socked in the gut.

“Fuck Brucey, your mouth,” Joker takes a step towards him, eyes burning with obsessive desire, and Bruce feels his knees try to buckle, something dark and previously undiscovered at the back of his mind wanting to make him submit. “Want to stretch it wide till your cheeks split.”

His fingers rub against Bruce’s lips, then push into Bruce’s mouth and crook to tug at the corners. Bruce feels almost drugged, all his self control shot to pieces, everything he thought he’d buried long ago surging up to the surface to overwhelm him. He catches one of Joker’s fingers with his tongue, tugs it deeper into his mouth and sucks on it. The fabric of Joker’s glove is a curious rough texture under his tongue, and he wishes he were tasting Joker’s bare skin but removing the glove would require him to let go of Joker’s finger and that’s an impossibility.

Joker takes another step forward, pressing against Bruce, and then another, and another, so that Bruce is backed up against the tunnel wall, trapped between stone and the warm firm heat of the Joker.

“So pretty,” Joker croons, his free hand cupping Bruce’s cheek, thumb smearing the makeup. “You look so pretty Batsy.” He pulls his finger out of Bruce’s mouth, and Bruce bites down hard on his own lip to keep the whimper inside. Joker steps even closer, the unmistakable hardness of his erection digging into Bruce’s hip, and pressed their foreheads together.

Joker’s breath, warm and smelling of coffee, is ghosting over Bruce’s lips, making him tremble, a century of wanting all slamming into him at once, destroying every other thought in his mind. “Joker,” he croaks out, his voice strange and desperate, and Joker groans.

“Gonna fuck you up Batsy,” he whispers, low and urgent. “Going to carve a smile into that pretty face and write my name on your heart in blood.”

Bruce has this vague feeling he should object to that, but his thoughts are distant and hard to grasp. “As least buy me dinner first,” he manages, in something approaching a normal voice, and Joker laughs, soft and genuine and completely unlike his normal mad laughter. It warms something deep inside Bruce to know that he’s the only one who gets to see Joker like this, the only one who gets these precious glimpses behind the madness.

“I’ll take you to the best restaurant in town baby,” Joker croons. “Wine you and dine you and suck you off under the table while you eat desert.” Bruce can’t help the little hitch of his hips at that, mindlessly seeking friction as he imagines that red painted mouth stretched wide. “Then I’ll take you back home to our little love nest, turn the lights down low, and fuck you up.” The last three words are said in a vicious growl that Bruce is pretty sure he shouldn’t find as hot as he does. “And after, when you’re bleeding and marked as mine, I’ll ride your fat cock. Make you scream for me.”

Bruce whimpers, hips thrusting forward and grinding against Joker’s erection. He feel high, feels like he’s coming out of his skin, hyperaware of Joker, of the feel of the makeup on his skin, Joker’s hand on his hip, squeezing hard enough to bruise.

“Joker,” he whispers, all other words impossible.

“But first we’d better find Vengeance and Sopporro,” Joker says abruptly, stepping away and adjusting his waistcoat.

Bruce sways forward, his body confused by the sudden lack of contact. He wants to beg Joker to come back, plead with him, and at the same time he want to punch him in the face for starting this.

Joker smiles at him, fond and a little mocking, and says, “Got obligations, darling. You can flirt on your own time.”

“That was flirting?” Bruce asks, unable to stop himself. God, if that was just flirting, he’d hate to see Joker try seduction. It would probably involve them both getting naked. Which is not the mental image he needs right now, not when Joker’s right. They’ve got work to do, and promises to keep, and now Joker isn’t touching him he’s remembering all the hundreds of reasons why sleeping with Joker is the worst idea he’s ever had in a lifetime of bad ideas.

“I’m going to kill you for this,” he growls at Joker, trying desperately to slow his racing pulse. Thank God for the suit’s protective cup. At least Sopporro and Scandal won’t know how hard he is, though he’s certain Joker does.

“No, you’re going to do your job like a good Bat, and then you’re going to masturbate in shower and pretend I’m not listening, like you always do,” Joker says, and there’s a note of real bitterness in his voice. “Why change the habits of a lifetime, huh?”

Bruce’s whole body goes hotcold. Has Joker been listening to him the whole time? Has he been getting off on it? Jesus, he doesn’t know how to process that, can’t decide between arousal and rage, so he just growls, “which way, Joker?” in his deepest and most intimidating voice, the one that has been known to make criminals actually wet themselves in sheer terror.

“Have I told you recently you have a sexy voice?” Joker asks, and when Bruce doesn’t respond, he sighs, and points down the tunnel. “This way.”

“Good. Now walk,” Bruce orders, waiting for Joker to move before he follows him, keeping plenty of space between them.

Bruce doesn’t pay attention to the route, alternating between staring at Joker and resolutely ignoring him, but after a few minutes walking they come out into the cavern he remembers from their inward journey. Opposite them, on the other side, the weak glow on one of Joker’s unicorn stickers shows green in the night vision.

As they splash through the deeper water of the cave, Bruce does his best to get himself back under control. He hates how easily Joker can unsettle him now, hates that a century of fighting means Joker knows him better than anyone else ever has. The time he got the spend with his family is so minute compared to the decades spent with Joker, and it’s inevitable that they should come to know one another well, but the frustrating thing is that Joker is still an enigma to Bruce in so many ways, while Joker can bring Bruce to his knees with a look. It makes him feel weak, and stupid, makes him want to lash out, reassert his dominance with fists, even though his rational mind knows that’s stupid. (For one thing, Joker likes it when Bruce hits him, which makes it totally counterproductive most of the time).

The journey back to the door seems shorter than he remembers, hardly more than a few minutes before he turns a corner and finds Sopporro and Scandal waiting for him. Sopporro lights up when she sees Joker and Joker smiles at her, warm and fond in a way that sets Bruce’s teeth on edge.

“Let's get out of here,” Scandal says when he reaches them, not bothering to waste time with a greeting. Bruce doesn’t blame her. He wants Sopporro out of his city as soon as possible. He can hear things slithering in the darkness, things he knows weren’t there a moment ago, things that makes him remember being eight and trapped at the bottom of a well, a childish fear he’s never fully conquered.

The door is the same mangled wreck Joker had left it, though when Bruce touches it he finds it’s solidified, the metal cool and hard under his gauntlet.

Scandal goes first, climbing cautiously down the cliff face, using the Laminas Pesar to support herself, boots sliding on the wet rock.

Sopporro stands in the doorway, looking down at the sea below, and shivers. “I can’t do it,” she says, sounding more present that Bruce has yet heard her, less like she’s half in a dream. “I’ll fall.”

“It’s okay,” Joker says, taking her hand. “We’ll go together. I’ll help you.”

Bruce doesn’t know if he should allow it, doesn’t fully trust Joker not to push Sopporro into the bay, but she looks at him with wide eyes, all hope and gratitude, and asks, “Really?!” in such a surprised child-like voice that Bruce can’t bring himself to say anything.

“Really,” Joker says. He climbs out through the hole without letting go of her hand, hanging from just his fingertips as she follows him.

When she’s out, hand white-knuckled as the grip the bottom of the door, Joker lets go and swings himself so that he’s braced over her, a buffer between her and the wind. He keeps on hand on her as they climb, moving it from her arm to her waist as needed, guiding her slowly down, talking low and soothing. Bruce has never seen anything so strange.

Joker has rare moments of being genuinely affectionate with Bruce, and he’s seen him ape tenderness with Harley, or hostages, but it’s never real. There’s no gentleness in Joker, it’s simply not in his nature, but here he is helping this girl, comforting her, and not asking anything in return. He hasn’t even hit on her. (Joker never means it when he hits on women, just does it to get a rise out of them, but he does it all the same). It’s a terrifying sign of the girl’s strength, that she can elicit this kind of out-of-character response from one of the world’s most dangerous men, and he adds it to the mental list of reasons why he wants this girl out of his city as soon as possible.

When they’re in the boat, Joker still hovering far closer to the girl than Bruce is okay with, he follows them down. It’s not a particularly difficult climb, the slickness of the wet rock offering the only challenge, but he can see why it would seem intimidating to Sopporro.

As soon as he’s seated in the boat, Joker switches seats, comes to sit beside him, his leg a line of heat against Bruce’s thigh, and Bruce hates so much that he actually relaxes a little at that. He clenches his hands into fists and says nothing as Scandal steers them back to the mainland.

Scandal brings them unerringly to the same dock they’d left from, shutting off the boat’s engine and letting it drift into the quay. She pauses before climbing out, turning and holding out a hand to Bruce. He takes it, squeezing it warmly, and she smiles at him.

“I won’t forget this,” she assures him. “You’ve done me a huge favour today, both of you, and I’ll repay you one day.”

Bruce just nods. The polite thing would be to say that it doesn’t matter, but that’s not how the world works, and a favour from Vengeance could be a very valuable thing. He dreads to think what Joker will use his for.

Sopporro waits until Scandal has leapt onto the dock before flinging her arms around Joker’s neck. “It was ever so nice to meet you Mr Clown,” she says seriously. “Thank you for coming to rescue me.”

Joker pats her back awkwardly, which is at least better than hitting her the way he used to Harley. “Anytime kiddo. I’ve never had a patron goddess before.”

Sopporro laughs, and releases him, turning to Bruce. “You look after him,” she says sternly. “I know it’s your job, but try not to be too nasty to my children, okay?”

Bruce nods, bemused, and gets his own hug, brief and tight.

Scandal helps Sopporro out of the boat and the two of them disappear into the darkness, Scandal turning to throw Bruce one last lazy salute. No doubt they’ll talk more another time, Bruce understand that right now her priority is getting Sopporro out of the city, and it’s one he fully supports. Even by Gotham standards the girl is creepy.

When they’re alone, Bruce restarts the engine, begins steering the boat towards the hidden waterway that will lead them to the cave.

“Well,” Joker says, after several minutes of pregnant silence, “That was fun.”

“If I turn on the news tomorrow and learn that you’ve killed anyone, I’m going to be very annoyed,” Bruce says. Joker laughs.

“Nothing worse than a little light maiming,” he assures him. “That guard probably won’t even go blind. Worst thing to happen to anyone tonight was a serious case of blue-balls.”

Bruce flinches. “Joker, you know we can’t…”

Joker slams a hand over his mouth. “No, no talking like that Brucey baby. We’ve have a lovely evening, I won’t have to ruin it now. Just shut up and drive the boat.”

It’s something that needs to be addressed, they can’t carry on forever in this strange no-man’s land of fleeting touches and lingering glances, but Bruce is feeling generous. He’s willing to let it go for now.

So instead of speaking he just leans into Joker’s warm familiar weight, and steers them home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so so much for coming on this mad journey with me. I hope you've enjoyed it half as much as I have.
> 
> I've got other things I'm working on right now (check them out maybe, they've got Batman, though no Joker since it's Injustice 'Verse) but this series is by no means over. Stay tuned for the New Justice League, and Bruce finally taking Joker out for the dinner and dancing he's been hinting at.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are love


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